Sunday 25 January 2009
Scotiabank Dance Centre, 677 Davie Street; 8pm
Tickets $20/$15 (students/seniors); available from Tickets Tonight, (604.684.2787 or www.ticketstonight.ca) and the door.
Free artist chat at 7pm; reception to follow performance

Vancouver New Music is pleased to present the world premiere performance of Cold Trip, a new work for chamber ensemble by Vancouver-based composer Jacqueline Leggatt that incorporates texts from a collection of poetry of the same name by Nancy Shaw and Catriona Strang. This performance is dedicated to the memory of Nancy Shaw, who passed away in 2007.

Cold Trip (both music & text) was inspired by Schubert’s Winterreise.  We were interested in probing the relationship between music & poetry as well as romantic & contemporary conceptions of the lyric.  We dwell in multiple time scales, conjuring the past through sensations of the present, while eliciting the present through residues of the past.  We interlace notions of speed, efficiency and instantaneousness with melancholy, sluggishness, and breakdown.  Like Schubert’s, our songs are queries of the sublime-its envelopment of the beauty and/or horror of the self, nature, war, kindness, passion, and disaster.

            -from Cold Trip: Schubert’s Winterreise Meets the Ramones  by Nancy Shaw

Music by Jacqueline Leggatt from poetry by Nancy Shaw & Catriona Strang; video art by Cornelia Wyngaarden; plus works by Edison Denisov, György Kurtag, a selection from Schubert’s Winterreise, arranged by Leggatt; and poetry readings by Catriona Strang and Lee Plested.

Program (program order TBD):
Edison Denisov
Variations on a Theme of Schubert (1986)

Franz Schubert
Das Wirtshaus from Winterreise (1897)
Arrangement by Jacqueline Leggatt

György Kurtag
Selections from Signs, Games and Messages for Strings, Violin and Viola (since 1989)
Selections from Hölderlin-Gesänge for Baritone (1975-6)

Jacqueline Leggatt
Cold Trip (2008)
World Premiere*

*Commissioned with the assistance of the British Columbia Arts Council Music Commissioning Awards Program and the Spirit of British Columbia Arts Fund