BRIM played by Eve Beglarian, Mary Rowel: Violin, Taylor Levine: Guitar, the Guidonian Hand, and special guests Karl Larson: Piano and Ken Thomson: Clarinet
Karl Larson and Anne Rainwater, two formidable interpreters of contemporary piano music, will premiere Ken Thomson’s bold new work on both coasts. Thomson’s virtuosic, three movement composition for solo piano will be premiered simultaneously by Karl Larson at the Firehouse Space in Brooklyn and Anne Rainwater at the Center for New Music in San Francisco. Entitled Me Vs., Thomson’s first work for solo piano challenges the performer at every turn. Requiring acrobatic precision coupled with fierce levels of visceral intensity, Thomson seems to dare the pianists to join him in a brawl on a tightrope. This program will also feature Eve Beglarian’s songs from the River Project, including Wet Psalm (an ASCAP Foundation Charles Kingsford Fund commission), Pump Music, In and Out of the Game, and other songs and instrumentals inspired by Beglarian’s trip down the Mississippi River. Watch promo video here.
Excerpt from an interview by By Amanda MacBlane in Time Out:
For Eve Beglarian, a downtown composer-performer with serious uptown cred, kayaking down the Mississippi River had never figured on her bucket list. After Katrina, however, Beglarian became obsessed with another devastating moment in Mississippian histroy: the flood of ’27. “Lots of people left the Delta and traveled to urban places all over the country,” she explains, “The blues would not have become the urban art form that it became, and we wouldn’t have rock & roll, without that flood, which makes you realize that the line we make between nature and culture is actually an artificial line. Things sort of overlap in ways that we can’t possibly predict.”
Then in November 2008, Barack Obama’s election ignited a desire in Beglarian, who had spent a lot of time abroad over the previous decade, to reconnect with her homeland. “I was working on a piece called The Flood, and I was just like, I need to experience this country, “she remembers. “It didn’t start out necessarily kayaking; it was moving at a slow enough pace to experience the ‘thisness’ of each place.”
Beglarian’s odyssey—dubbed the River Project—began in Minnesota at the river’s headwaters in August 2009. Traveling by kayak and bike, and camping most nights, she ended up at the Gulf of Mexico four-and-a-half months later. Her detailed blog (evbvd.com/riverblog/) traces her descent into the Deep South and a corresponding shift in consciousness. This week, the project’s final phase takes flight with a minifestival of pieces inspired by the journey.
Those familiar with Beglarian’s work—which routinely marries singable lines to erudite concepts—know not to expect a musical treasury of folktales la Sufjan Stevens. “This has been an awakening about history, about ecology, about river science,” she says. “There are all these things that I knew nothing about that I now know a little bit about and they’ve completely changed my sense of what I want to focus on. It’s not so much an A-to-B connection, like, ‘I saw this town, and so I wrote this piece.’ It’s more like there’s this whole new way of seeing who we are as a people, what this country is—and that influences what I’m making.” Although folk, gospel and blues influences color the new pieces, they are unmistakably composed in Beglarian’s voice, with liberal use of sampling, loops and haunting vocals.
