Eve Egoyan THETHINGSINBETWEEN

Eve Egoyan, specializing in the works of living composers, releases her first CD the things in between. The selections, all world premiere recordings, range from minimalist to experimental, from the lushly complex and abstract to compositions which recall a more standard classical repertoire. Eve has performed solo recitals to sold out houses, and as a soloist with some of the country’s leading orchestras.

“With grace and intensity in equal measure, Canadian pianist Eve Egoyan seems incapable of an unmellifluous gesture…And if there’s a thread that runs through this recording, it is the affection which the composers and performer obviously have for the piano – for its sonority, versatility and history.” (Elissa Poole, Opus)

“A performer whose powers of listening cast a hypnotic spell over her audiences, opening their ears and hearts… What’s Egoyan´s secret? Meticulous preparation. Discerning choice of repertoire-she only plays music she loves… An innate love for piano sonorities and texture. Abundant technique that never advertises itself. A passionate desire to get under the skin of the music she plays… and Egoyan´s magical quality of listening…” (National Post)

Daan Vandewalle ALVIN CURRAN Inner Cities

Inner Cities are where you go to get debriefed, to dance a tarantella with Gurdjieff; to see Italo Calvino greet Giordano Bruno in Campo De’ Fiori; to play low C 78 times and low D-flat once for Giacinto Scelsi’s 79th birthday; to hear Louis Armstrong fuse time and space in Providence, and Ella, Peanuts Hucko, and Brubeck fill a Newport stadium unamplified; to watch Cage and Braxton play chess in Washington Square Park; to roll around in a pile of rags with Pistoletto and Simone Forti; to listen to Ezra Pound’s silence by the Grand Canal; to hear Julian Beck say "Paradise Nooow....." and years later on film say "I wuz bawn in a garbage can"; to become a composer in the Coolidges’ apple tree; to hear Miles and Coltrane blow minds at Storyville (price, one coca-cola); to listen to Cy Twombly just back from the Gobi desert; to meet Diana in her temple on Lake Nemi; to hear Art Tatum play the whole world from memory; to record, for Perlini’s "Otello", a tin can rolling through a Venetian church; to give an impromtu ram’s-horn concert for Palestinian shopkeepers; to ride with a New York cabbie nuts about Gubaidulina; to sit at Patience Gray’s table; to plant a Magnetic Garden in the Beat 72 theater; to make love with a Jewish Rhein-maiden; to help Giuseppe Chiari remix Palazzo Strozzi and Robert Ashley collect dust from the union-floor of Local 802; to hear fog-horns with the Narragansett Indians; to cook funghi porcini for Luigi Nono in Berlin-Friedenau; to meet Morty Feldman on Eighth Street; to make the Ligurian coast into watercolormusic with Edith Schloss; to hang with the Carrara anarchists and the Bertolucci’s in Tellaro where DH Lawrence had his piano delivered by mules; to get booed off the floor staging Korean folk songs in Darmstadt; to listen for Messaien in Birdland; to hear Evan Parker play the Festa dell'Unita and George Lewis play the Tower of Pisa; to see and hear Annea Lockwood’s astounding glass concert at the Middle Earth; to be sitting in a room with Alvin Lucier; to hear Thelonius Monk detune time at the Five-Spot; to observe Sartre and Beauvoir drinking Campari from a window on Piazza Navona; to accompany ventriloquists, hypnotists, sirtos dancers, and bouzouki players in the Catskills; to watch Lenny Michaels dance the mambo at Susan’s Piano-Bar and Grill; to see Steve Lacy play his soprano sax with his left leg; to blow shofar to Judith Malina’s Shelley; to split the MEV door at the Obitorio; to copy for Cardew while he rolled the revolution on the banks of the Tiber; to play on a Holland American Ocean Liner which later catches fire and sinks; to wish that Meredith Monk, Diamanda Galas, Joan La Barbara, Billie Holiday would sing from the minarets five times a day; to play Dixieland in the Brussels World’s Fair across from Varese and Xenakis’ Phillips Pavillion; to play "An American in Paris" in Dahomey with John Sebastian Sr. on harmonica; to witness real Balinese dance in trance; to accidentally step on Dietrich Fischer Dieskau's foot backstage at the Akademie der Kunste; to record an interview with King Hussein of Jordan; to watch Trisha Brown levitate on Bach in San Francisco; to help Cage squeeze lemons into his fresh taboule on 18th Street and watch David Tudor mix chili peppers and lasers at the Grand Hotel des Palmes; to play the Sydney Harbour like a bandoneon; to teach advanced-orchestration in the Greek Theater at Mills College with Pauline Oliveros and the ghost of Harry Partch; to shake Stravinsky's hand in the American Sector-Berlin and Varese’s in New Haven; to watch Kosugi dance his electric violin around Marcus Aurelius; to get thrown off stage in London as a warmup act for the Pink Floyd; to meet Stockhausen at a strobe-light show in Düsseldorf; to open windows on Cage’s cue for adding real cold air to his Winter Music; to camp out with Teitelbaum and Rzewski for Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point; to hear Terry and LaMonte’s landmark concerts at the Attico in Rome; to help Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik get an introduction to the Pope; to nearly get sequestered along with Arnold Dreyblatt’s instruments at the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof; to play the "Tennessee Waltz" with a banjo-band in Florence; to hear Maryanne Amacher make sound circle your head in her Boston harbor basement; to have tea and guffaws with Helen and Elliott; to play "Drumming" with Steve Reich in Pamplona; to bury 80 loudspeakers under Melissa’s Floor Plan in Linz and feed hay to a Diskklavier in Donaueschingen; to play with the original Scratch Orchestra; to make 300 people in 6 countries who cannot see or hear one another play together on the radio; to drink a Turka-Cola at the foot of Mt. Ararat; to hear Scelsi’s piano sonata on the car radio in central Anatolia; to make a concert of shiphorns in the "Golf of Poets"; to be 5 years old in Central Falls, Rhode Island, sitting next to my father in the trombone section at the Sunday afternoon Vaudeville show. (Alvin Curran 14.8.04)

Bruce Brubaker INNER CITIES

Bruce Brubaker joined the New England Conservatory faculty as piano chair in 2005. In live performances from the Hollywood Bowl to New York’s Avery Fisher Hall, from Paris to Hong Kong, and in his continuing series of recordings for Arabesque—Bruce Brubaker is a visionary virtuoso. Named “Young Musician of the Year” by Musical America, Bruce Brubaker performs Mozart with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Philip Glass on the BBC. Profiled on NBC’s "Today" show, Brubaker’s playing, writing, and collaborations continue to show a shining, and sometimes surprising future for pianists and piano playing. His blog “PianoMorphosis” appears at ArtsJournal.com.

Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post critic Tim Page has said: “I wouldn't trade Pollini, Argerich, Richard Goode, Peter Serkin or Bruce Brubaker (to mention a terrific younger artist) for any handful of Horowitzes!” Brubaker was presented by Carnegie Hall at Zankel Hall in New York, at Trifolion in Echternach, at Michigan’s Gilmore Festival, and at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, as the opening-night performer in the museum’s acclaimed new Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed building. He is a frequent performer at New York City’s Le Poisson Rouge.

Bruce Brubaker’s CDs for Arabesque include Time Curve (music by Philip Glass and William Duckworth), Hope Street Tunnel Blues (music by Glass and Alvin Curran, featuring Brubaker’s transcription of a portion of Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach), Inner Cities (including a live recording of John Adams’s Phrygian Gates and Brubaker’s transcription of part of Adams’s opera Nixon in China), and the first CD in the series, glass cage, named one of the best releases of the year by The New Yorker magazine. (New England Conservatory)