Christina Petrowska Quilico Live Piano Performance: Ann Southam's Fast River #6

Part of Christina Petrowska Quilico's live performance of a wide selection of Ann Southam's Rivers suite, filmed at the Arts & Letters Club of Toronto, on October 25, 2010. This is an incredibly demanding body of piano pieces, requiring not only virtuosic piano skill, but incredible stamina... (continued . . . )

About Ann Southam:

Ann Southam was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1937 but lived most of her life in Toronto. After completing musical studies at the University of Toronto and the Royal Conservatory of Music in the early 1960's, Ann Southam began a teaching and composing career which has included a long and productive association with modern dance.

Selected Media Coverage:

Going with the flow
"Ann Southam... made a big splash on Tuesday night at Toronto's Music Gallery, thanks to pianist Christina Petrowska Quilico, who dove into the first complete performance of Southam's Rivers with rare intensity and commitment.

"...Rivers was in the right hands. Petrowska Quilico knows this music -- all million-or-so notes of it -- backwards and forwards: She's recorded the whole thing for a set of CDs co-produced by the CBC and the Canadian Music Centre, recently released on the Centrediscs label. More important, she knows how to draw forth all of the colour and expression that Southam has put in her score."
-- Colin Eatock, special to the Globe and Mail

"I like Christina Petrowska Quilico's "go big or go home" attitude to the piano recital, and was particularly happy to hear that she is performing Ann Southam's complete Rivers cycle at the Music Gallery.... Petrowska did an exceptionally beautiful job of the slow pieces, casting a spell with her quiet, bell-like sound. I also liked the strong, confident flow she gave not just to the fast pieces, but also the slow fast ones.

"Quilico arranged them in groups that provided contrasts of tempos. But during the last piece one felt, not a heroic sense of arrival or a sense of triumph over adversity, as one would in a traditional symphony, but a sense of peace in the journey itself. Although this last piece - the final one of the cycle, in fact - was the longest, I kept hoping it would never end."
-- Tamara Bernstein, National Post

Canadian Composers Portraits: Ann Southam - Rivers (Centrediscs CMCCD 10505, 2005)

"I didn't think anyone would play this piece. But when Christina performed it, I loved the sound and what was happening as the hands interacted. And I loved the little tunes and motifs that could be heard in the interaction between the hands. It takes a whiz-bang pianist to make those heard. I don't know how she does it!"
-- Ann Southam, composer

"Toronto virtuosa Christina Petrowska Quilico becomes the first pianist to perform Ann Southam's Rivers cycle in its entirety tonight. The 19 solo piano pieces, written from 1979-1981, last a total of two hours, and demand extraordinary physical stamina from the player. Petrowska, whose recording of the cycle has just been released on the Centrediscs label, has the monster technique to pull it off. Built on intricately and unpredictably interlocking melodic patterns, the pieces carry the listener into shimmering, at times ecstatic, realms."
-- Tamara Bernstein, the National Post

"This music is intelligently absorbing, though not in the manner of a Beethoven sonata. It is pleasurable, though some will feel that each piece is too long. Listening to it is something like listening to Bach, where the beauty is in the piece and the execution, not in the performer's creative thought processes. The performer must simply execute in a very skillful and highly aesthetic way, what the composer wrote. Kudos to Christina Petrowska Quilico, piano professor at York University in Toronto, for doing exactly that."
-- Kilpatrick, American Record Guide

"Rating: 9 out of 10."
-- Jerry Bowles, Sequenza21

Discs of the Month
"Christina Petrowska Quilico gives an outstanding performance of these intricate minimalist works that range from contemplative to ebullient."
-- David Olds, The WholeNote


Buy this 3 CD Set:
http://musiccentre.ca/apps/index.cfm?fuseaction=search.dspItemDetails&buy...


Video Credits:

Camera Operators:
Alexandra Weiss
Paul Yedema
Jeff Barlow

Editing and Post Production:
http://inspireinc.com

Copyright @2010, 2011
Christina Petrowska Quilico
http://PetrowskaQuilico.com
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Category:

Music

Tags:

• piano
• music
• contemporary classical
• new music
• contemporary composer
• woman composer
• 20th century music
• avant-garde
• contemporary dance
• modern dance
• Rivers
• water theme
• water

[PetrowskaQuilico]

Thank you @abqcleve . Followed your appreciation for seeing my hands, in my recent upload of another of this suite, Fast River #2.

[PetrowskaQuilico]

@OldRabit Thank you!

Subscribed to your channel, too.

Please everyone, feel free to follow my Twitter stream @cpquilico for updates

:)

[PetrowskaQuilico]

@PSearPianist :) The huge 12-pages-at-once scores seem to get a lot of attention from my fellow pianists :)

They’re really necessary, as I prefer not to have a page-turner on stage with me, and at this pace, there’s no way that I could both play and turn pages.

[leconfidant]

Oh, this is just wonderful. I only listened to it for two seconds and I already knew it would be an adventure. Bloody brilliant.

[My80sUnderground]

JUST... amazing. Simply... amazing. Seriously, MY hands feel tired after that performance!

[OldRabit]

Marvelous!

[abqcleve]

Fabulous to actually now be able to see your hands! The earlier Southam vids were too low res--they were just a blur. I love this music and what you've done to share this with the world. Nobody comes close to you with Southam! Brava!!

[PSearPianist]

Most interesting video and music. I am envious of your ability to read what looks like very small print on a photo-reduced score, and only wish I could do that!