The Music Gallery presents

Lori Freedman + CCMC

PART OF X AVANT X

Thursday, October 15

Doors: 8pm | Concert: 9pm

The Music Gallery, 197 John St.

Tickets: $20 Regular | $10 members/students | $15 Advance at musicgallery.org

It’s an anniversary within an anniversary: the X Avant Festival of new music turns 10 as we turn 40.

In celebrating these anniversaries, the logical place to start is at the beginning: the mighty CCMC opens our festival. Michael Snow (a founding member of the Music Gallery), John Oswald, Paul Dutton, and John Kamevaar are the current lineup of the longrunning ensemble which lent their name to and set the tone for the early years of the Music Gallery. Their omnivorous approach to spontaneous composition remains fresh and inquisitive. More than four decades on, no two performances are alike.

Frequent MG visitor and “musical revolutionary in the front ranks of the avant garde” (Georgia Straight), Lori Freedman returns with an exciting new show entitled The Virtuosity of Excess, featuring several new commissions.

Says Freedman: “The title is a quote from one of the composers on the program, Raphael Cendo. What this implies for me is an exploration (and sometimes exploitation) of the beauty of extremes. The program has been constructed like a full course meal with careful attention paid to the accumulation of rich but varied ‘food groups’ (the aural palate and the psycho-sensorial states).”

The Virtuosity of Excess, a 10-city North American tour, travels throughout the clarinet family with seven works covering its range from B-flat to contrabass, plus voice and other goodies. The 6 compositions to be performed at X-Avant are by Brian Ferneyhough, Richard Barrett, Raphael Cendo, Paul Steenhuisen, Paolo Perezzani, and Freedman herself, with the latter three composers having written pieces especially for this programme. These performances will be filmed, then integrated into Freedman’s DVD recording project SOLOR.