Event Details
Saturday May 31
FRANCES-MARIE UITTI + LORI FREEDMAN — IN DUO PERFORMANCE
Part of the soundaXis Festival
Doors 8pm, concert 9pm (note later start time)
Tickets: $25 regular, $20 member + senior, $10 students
Available at www.ticketweb.ca
Frances-Marie Uitti — cello
Lori Freedman — clarinet, bass clarinet
Programme:
Earle Brown — December 1952 (x3) (duo)
Kaija Saariajo — Oi Kuu (duo)
Frances-Marie Uitti — La Notte (duo)
Magnus Lindberg — Steamboat Bill Junior (duo)
intermission
Lori Freedman — Brief Candles (solo)
Iannis Xenakis — Charisma (duo)
Frances-Marie Uitti — Rap't (solo)
Lori Freedman — LafumufaL (duo)
Lori Freedman and Frances-Marie Uitti, both of whom are composers, improvisers and repertoire addicts, met over Xenakis' Charisma. And charisma it was! They have since improvised in Xenakis' magical space La Tourette and elsewhere and are putting together programs featuring the work of present day masters Saariaho, Lindberg, Cage and Brown.
Frances-Marie Uitti, composer/cellist, tours as solist extensively playing for audiences from New York City to Mongolia and appears regularly in such festivals as the Biennale Di Venezia, Strasbourg Festival, Gulbenkian Festival Ars Musica, Holland Festival and for radios and televisions in Europe, Japan, and the United States. She premeired cello concerti dedicated to her by Per Norgaard, Jonathan Harvey, William Jeths, Peter Nelson and others.
Using two bows in one hand, Ms.Uitti pioneered a new dimension to the cello by transforming it for the first time into a polyphonic instrument capable of sustained chordal (two, three, and four-part) and intricate multivoiced writing. This invention permits contemporaneous cross accents, multiple timbres, contrasting 4-voiced dynamics, simultaneous legato/articulated playing, that her previous work with a curved bow couldn't attain.
György Kurtág, Luigi Nono, Clarence Barlow, Giacinto Scelsi, Louis Andriessen, Jonathan Harvey, Richard Barrett, and many others are among those who have used this technique in their works dedicated to her. Collaborating significantly over years with radicals, Dick Raaijmakers, John Cage and Giacinto Scelsi, she has also worked closely with Iannis Xenakis, Elliott Carter, Brian Ferneyhough and countless composers from the new generation.
She collaborates with filmmakers Frank Scheffer and Frans Zwaartjes, Elliott Sharp, Pauline Oliveros, DJ Scanner, DJ Low, and Stephen Vitiello. The University of California Press has commissioned a book from her on Contemporary Cello Techniques. A massive treatise on the state of the art of cello and performance techniques from the Kodaly Sonata until the present, it is now in the finishing stages.Her treatise New Frontiers, was also published in the Cambridge Companion to the Cello, Cambridge University Press and for Muzik Texte, Koln, and Arcana, the collected writings of composers edited by John Zorn. Contemporary Music Review published her interviews in a double edition, Improvisation.
Ms Uitti has taught at Oberlin Conservatory and recently given masterclasses at Yale University, Northwestern University again in 2003. She was invited for a Fromm Foundation residency at Harvard University in the season 2003/04 and a residency at Mills College in 2005. In 2005 she was awarded her second regents' lectureship at the University of California Berkeley.
“...Uitti’s performance is stunning, even when measured by the very high standard of her past recordings and concerts. In her hands the cello alternately sings and keens, howls and whispers. She is a supremely gifted musician whose ability encompasses everything from standard practice through the most original of utterances." — Opera News
Lori Freedman
Going full throttle in both contemporary and improvised music streams, this “musical revolutionary” is known internationally as one of the most provocative and creative performers. Her work includes contemporary, improvised and electroacoustic music and she frequently extends into multi-disciplinary forms, collaborating with dance, theatre and visual artists. Her “demonstration of outstanding leadership, integrity and excellence in the area of contemporary music and jazz” earned her the 1998 Freddie Stone Award.
Over 40 composers have written bass clarinet music for her and her work has been recorded on 31 CDs, most recently Plumb (with Scott Thomson), 3 (3 Montreal Trios), Thin Air (Queen Mab Trio), À un moment donné (thirteen solo improvisations), and Huskless! (clarinet/bass clarinet repertoire). As soloist Freedman recently appeared at Le couvent de la Tourette near Lyon France, in Toronto’s SoundaXis Festival 2006, the World Bass Clarinet Conference in Rotterdam, the International Jazz Festivals of Montreal, Guelph and Vancouver, and as clarinet soloist for DR COlemaan’s concerto Ibergang with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.
She produced the solo concert There, in here, premiering seven new commissioned works for the event, and her Queen Mab Trio gave 40 concerts during two European/North American tours. She is currently preparing solo performances for a new music video Solor (Mode Records) and at the Exceptional Performers Festival in Vancouver, in addition to ensemble collaborations with Joëlle Léandre, Frances-Marie Uitti, George Lewis, Mark Dresser and Fred Frith and her Montreal-based ensemble Transmission.
"Lori Freedman is the best thing that ever happened to New Music. It is fantastic playing by a fantastic musician." — composer John Corigliano, New York
