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Claude Vivier : Shiraz
Performed live by Andrew Infanti
Claude Vivier is a Canadian composer born in Montréal in 1948, murdered in Paris in 1983.
Andrew Infanti discovered this work at a Vivier retrospective in Tanglewood, Massachusetts. He has often programmed the piece in recitals and wrote an extensive analysis of it.
In 1976, Vivier took an extended voyage to the Near East, Bali, and Japan which he called a “journey to the core of myself.” The following year (1977) the composer produced a torrent of music which attempted a response to the encounter with these cultures. This creative explosion produced the passionate Shiraz for piano solo. (continue reading …)
Live performance of Shiraz by Andrew Infanti.
An Iranian city
About this work the composer writes (transl. from French) :
“Shiraz, a city in Iran — a pearl of a city, a rough-cut diamond — inspired me to write a work for piano similarly hewn: the concept being contained in the movements of the hands on the piano. The writing is strictly in four voices (two voices per hand), always developed in a homophonic manner from which slowly emerges a two-part counterpoint. A return to the abrupt motion and finally a chorale ending with a question-mark. The work is dedicated to the marvelous pianist Louis-Phillipe Pelletier and indirectly to two blind singers whom I followed through the marketplace in Shiraz.”
Heard through the ears of Vivier’s own musical culture, Shiraz also seems to pay double homage to composers Karlheinz Stockhausen (whose famous Klavierstück IX is evoked at the opening) and Olivier Messiaen (through allusion to his “modes of limited transposition”). Vivier’s signature homorhythmic writing, found in nearly all his mature work, seeks a form of pure melody as an aesthetic antidote to the contrapuntal, developmental, (and heterosexual?) aspects of most Western music.
