DARK BLUE SKY DREAM | Julia Ogrydziak, Artistic Director, Violin | Elaine Chew, Piano
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DESCRIPTION  |   VISUALS   |   SCORE/NOTES   |   VIDEO CLIPS FROM OAKLAND SHOW
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MULTIMEDIA SCORE
Throughout Dark Blue Sky Dream, real-time interactive visuals are merged with live performance. A team of 8 works behind the scenes with two live performers on stage, all using a media score created for the performance. The media included a live video feed from the stage, 20 slide projectors, real-time audio, multiple video streams, lasers, lighting, planets, and planetarium star system.
View Media score (PDF, 70k)


About the Show: LAYERING
The entire program is a journey through hidden layers of time and space – hidden and visible, remote and accessible. Whether through the general layering of composers and influences from across the Northern Hemisphere, from Estonia, to Japan, to America, ...to the specific layering of meter, harmony, and theme, to the abstract layering of the recognizable and emotive visuals, to the ephemeral layering of time, memory, dialogues, and emotion.

PROGRAM

Fratres (1980), Arvo Pärt (Estonia)
Arvo Part was born in Estonia in 1935. In 1976, he emerged after a 4-year long silence with a new compositional style, called tintinnabuli – referring to the pealing of bells. Studying medieval music and turning to his new style to seek answers to questions of life, music and work, the music centers on a gradual unfolding of ideas from within the sound itself, emerging from silence at the beginning of the work and slowly returning to it as the piece closes. It is an attempt to create music to transcend time, evoke human frailty, and encompass spirituality within the modern world. Fratres is in this style.

Second Sonata for Violin and Piano (1978), William Bolcom (USA)
I. Summer Dreams
II. Brutal – Fast
III. Adagio
IV. In Memory of Joe Venuti

William Bolcom is an American composer and pianist. In this piece, Bolcom’s great interest in American jazz is in full display. In particular, the last movement of this sonata is written in the style of Joe Venuti, known as the “first great violinist of jazz.” There are many references to his playing throughout the piece – from characteristic slides, to quotes from pieces he played, to
some of the comedy and improvisation which were hallmarks of his style. This piece is a mixture of the apparent and the hidden - lazy afternoons lead to sudden lightning storms, cloudy memories lead to bittersweet recollections, and the strange masquerades as the usual.

Nocturne (1994), Kaija Saariaho (Finland)
This piece for solo violin is actually a sketch of a longer concerto for violin and orchestra entitled Graal Théâtre, premiered in 1995. It was written in memory of Witold Lutoslawski at the request of the Avanti Chamber Orchestra. Born in Finland in 1952, Saariaho has lived and worked in Paris since 1982. Her pieces are landscapes which harken back to Finland - they open and
expand before the listener. Nocturne is a combination of the introvert and sacred, with the extrovert and theatrical. It evokes a light and open landscape, similar to Sibelius, with an element of magic and a temporal logic of its own. The piece is nterwoven with delicacy and richness, activity and stillness.

Hika (1973), Toru Takemitsu (Japan)
Takemitsu’s influences ranged widely from Debussy and Messian, to American Jazz, to Webern, to traditional Japanese music. His music is impressionistic, almost literary. Many of his pieces stem from a poem or a quote, and he was an excellent essayist as well as film composer, writing music to over 90 films. He describes his music like a Japanese formal garden, a “combination of natural beauty and cultured formality.” According to him, time is a circulating and repeating entity, and as one listens to a piece, it is like a picture scroll, different scenes emerge in still life, each scene altered by action and light, and perspective. Sounds reveal themselves through their environment. The title of this piece, Hika, means Elegy.

Sonata for Violin and Piano (1927), Maurice Ravel (France)
Allegretto
Blues – Moderato
Perpetuum Mobile – Allegro

This piece for violin and piano was begun in 1924 and not completed until 1927. Ravel struggled with this piece, as he reflected on the independence and seeming incompatibility of the two instruments – violin and piano – which he saw as fundamental to writing the sonata. Whereas many classical composers seek to combine the violin and piano into one voice, he chose to keep them separate and distinct, in dialogue. The piece is influenced by Jazz sounds and rhythms, with improvisational themes, jazz harmonies, and jazz rhythms. This is particularly evident in the second movement (“Blues.”) A perfectionist, he had a unique composing style, creating distinct blocks of music, and then assembling them into larger, more complex structures. This attention to detail coupled with his belief that ”sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art” created a piece full of joy and vigor and life.