Previous Page (News Index).Canada, November 26.
Cambridge Street Records announces a new Compact Disc, Inside, by Canadian composer Barry Truax. The CD features four recent electroacoustic works (Powers of Two: The Artist, Bamboo Silk and Stone, Inside, and Beauty and The Beast).
The performers on this disk are some of Canada's best: the outstanding oboist, Lawrence Cherney, Vancouver based Asian instrument performer Randy Raine-Reusch, and making their solo recording debut, lyric tenor Marcel van Neer and counter-tenor David Garfinkle.
The music on this CD, Cambridge Street Records says, "promises to be the most sensuous and lyrical ever heard in the computer music genre." The title track, Inside, explores the rich resonances of the rarely heard bass oboe. The evocative oboe d'amore and English horn are heard in a dramatic retelling of the traditional Beauty and the Beast tale, whose enchantment is dramatized by the digital processing of the dialogue and instruments. Two of the graphic images that accompany a live performance of this piece, by Vancouver composer and computer graphic artist Theo Goldberg, are reproduced on the CD booklet covers.
The CD also includes a virtuoso performance by Randy Raine-Reusch on the Chinese stringed instrument, the guzheng, in a work entitled Bamboo, Silk and Stone, in which a variety of Asian instruments are digitally processed to form a rich soundscape to surround the soloist.
The most recent and ambitious work on the CD is the electroacoustic music theatre work, Powers of Two: The Artist, based on a libretto by the composer. It portrays the journey of the title character, a lyric tenor, who seeks guidance from the Seer, a counter-tenor, in a search for sexual, psychological and spiritual fulfillment. The accompanying tape creates a timeless soundscape based on the resonant processing of various historical music and poetic sources, punctuated by Pacific Rim percussion and environmental ambiences. This work was commissioned with the assistance of the Canada Council by the Banff Centre for the 1995 International Computer Music Conference.