O’Donnell / Goldstein / Bozzini Quartett / Studio Percussion graz /Janáček Philharmonie Ostrava

A Contemporary Response to Charles Ives is the title of New York pianist Heather O'Donnell's piano recital, in which seven compositions will be premiered.
From today's perspective, Ives' 2nd String Quartet mirrors the 5th String Quartet by the American composer Gloria Coates. Her filigree and microtonally unfolded sound spaces are juxtaposed with Tom Johnson's rationally thought-out quartet Combinations, which is reduced to a formula in each individual movement.

With works such as Pulse (1939) by Henry Cowell, Living Room Music (1940) by John Cage, Canticle No. 1 (1940) by Lou Harrison and percussion music by William Russell, who is little known in this country, a cross-section of the percussion music created in America in the 1930s and 1940s is offered. This music impressively demonstrates how the spectrum of tonal colours that existed until then was expanded through the integration of everyday objects and the discovery of other instruments from foreign cultures, and how the percussion apparatus freed itself from its metrical and accentuating function in the traditional orchestra and formed a new typical genre through the amalgamation of complex rhythms, not least from the realms of popular music.
Four works for three orchestras pick up on the threads that Ives laid down with the expansion of sound into the microtonal, his stylistic pluralism, the concept of the simultaneity of different events and the utilisation of musical and acoustic space.

Malcolm Goldstein stands between the individual event blocks with his virtuoso structured improvisations. These do not follow the usual pattern but, in the spirit of Ives, place the different works in a communicative performance situation like a montage.