GeorgesDimitrov.com » Contemporary Music

Deconstructing László

admin — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 05:18:26 +0000

This work for two pianos and percussion, commissioned by the Quatrix Quartet, is a tribute to the creation of the Hungarian painter, photographer and sculptor László Moholy-Nagy. Contemporary of Bartók, Moholy-Nagy was strongly associated with the Bauhaus art movement and its formalist ideas: more concise than Kandinsky but less cerebral than Malevich, his paintings are fascinatingly dynamic. In nine short movements, the suite deconstructs the aesthetic of the artist in an alternating sequence of movements named Order and their opposite, Disorder: two states of matter simultaneously present in his visual works, yet here dislocated.

Deconstructing László is primarily a work centered on time: a musical transposition of the artist’s spatial ideas, the work on the perception of time accounts for all aspects of the composition. Inspired by the disturbed clockwork mechanics dear to composers such as Ligeti (the Disorder movement are an explicit reference to the first Piano Étude by the composer, also of Hungarian origin) or Bartók, the score continuously exploits metric phase shifts and echo patterns to confuse the listener’s perception of time: a time that seems to speed up or slow down, stretch or shrink, an illusion agaisnt a steady pulse. As a counterpoint to this onslaught on the edge of chaos appear the slow, too slow, Order movements, where the smooth and suspended time continues a tension still charged with violence. In a Pärt-evoking mysticism, the work is interspersed with silence and stillness, as emotionally charged as the notes that surround them.

Regard vers l’Est : Deconstructing László de Georges Dimitrov - an article (in French) by Éric Champagne to read on cettevilleetrange.org.

The trailer for the October 27th concert One, Deux, Haróm! is now available on dailymotion.com.

For more information : http://www.levivier.ca/en/calendrier/29001/.

Pictures of a Revolution

admin — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 21:47:14 +0000

Suite in five movements for large orchestra, this work is a series of pictures, a musical testimony of historical events that marked the countries of Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain, of which we are still feeling the repercussions today. The rise and fall of communism is depicted here through five conflicts featuring as many cities: the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, the uprising in Budapest in 1956, the Prague Spring in 1968, the 1980 strike of Solidarity in Gdansk and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Three out of the five movements were premiered in Montreal on June 18th 2011 by the Orchestre Symphonique de l’Isle, conducted by Cristian Gort.

This first part is inspired by the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 against the German occupation – by the Polish resistance (Armia Krajowa). Not to be confused with the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto Uprising, this insurrection allowed a population without military training and equipped with rudimentary weapons to take and hold the city for nearly six months. The irony of the inevitable ensuing repression pertains to the role of the Soviet Army who waited – posted on the other side of the Vistula while the representatives of Stalin dealt peace in secret with Berlin – for the resistance to be crushed to “liberate” the city.

Having a free hand to impose its own rule, the USSR will rewrite history denying the role of AK in favor of a communist resistance, in fact almost nonexistent. The cowardice of the Soviet army together with the Polish debacle led the Soviet Union to establish its dominance in central Europe and laid the foundations for the future Warsaw Pact signed in 1955. Cornerstone of the establishment of world balance after the Second World War, this episode was a natural candidate to start the Pictures at a revolution cycle.

Warszawa 1944Warszawa1944

The second movement of Pictures of a revolution is inspired by the uprising of October 1956 that occurred in Hungary in the wake of the liberalization attempts made the same year in Poland following Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s “crimes”. Inspired by groups of intellectuals who dared to dream of a “socialism with a human face”, 12 years before the term was immortalized by Alexander Dubcek – President of the Czechoslovak Communist Party before the events in Prague in 1968 – students and workers spontaneously united in a revolution that brought down the communist government in power. The establishment of workers’ councils, a genuine people’s power, the election of opposition leader Imre Nagy, the euphoria finally, sadly only lasted a few days before the arrival of the tanks.

The repression of Budapest, of all those suffered by the satellite nations of the USSR, was the more brutal with a death toll approaching 3,000 dead on the Hungarian side. The 1950s leaving the Eastern bloc in a period where the post-Stalin denunciations existed more to warrant the legitimacy of the new regime than to express genuine remorse, Soviet troops did not hesitate to violently quell the revolt without regard to the diplomatic consequences – this episode moreover strongly precipitated the downfall of the utopian ideal of communism in Western Europe. It is this coldness and brutality that this movement essentially tries to express through the irony of a scherzo.

Budapest 1956Budapest1956

The third movement is based on the events of the Prague Spring that occurred in 1968. The coming to power of Alexander Dubcek in January launched a series of democratic reforms: freedom of press, decentralization of the economy, national autonomy … the list is ambitious and does not go unnoticed in Moscow which sees with a dim view these “anti-socialist” changes eerily reminiscent of the Budapest episode. Negotiations of more or less good faith could not provide a solution to the dispute between the Czechs and their “motherland” and the Warsaw Pact troops invaded the country seven months later on August 21. Political opponents are imprisoned and the communist power restored.

The prevailing feeling is this movement of that of romanticism, in the original sense of the word with all that it conveys of light and drama. The uprising in Prague, unlike that of Budapest which was here seen with a cynical vision, left behind it an aura of passion and enthusiasm: if the repression was brutal yet again despite a death toll much lower – nearly a hundred, according to official estimates – it this the joy that history retained. Of all movements, the third is the most spirited: while the dance was in Budapest 1956 macabre, here it becomes a waltz which takes up and carries the musical flow.

Praha 1968Praha1968

The fourth movement of Pictures of a revolution stops in the maritime city of Gdansk, Poland’s second city in the cycle – 1980 there was the year of Solidarność (Solidarity), the first free trade union in the Soviet bloc. The unjustified dismissal of Anna Walentynowicz – co-founder of the worker’s association together with Lech Walesa – from the Gdansk shipyards ignited a population already reeling from drastic increases in prices of basic commodities.

The ensuing strike paralyzed the site in August and extended to the entire state: indeed, after the failures of the student strikes of 1967 and those severely repressed of workers in 1970, the country finally rose with unit to bend the communist government, a first. The authorization of the trade union allowed the creation of an independent political force in Eastern Europe, a counterweight to official power. Becoming a political party in its own right after a decade of struggle, Solidarity won the first free elections of the satellite countries in 1989 – without the spark of Gdansk, the Wall would not have fallen so soon.

Gdańsk 1980Gdansk1980

On 9 November 1989 the Berlin Wall fell under the onslaught of the crowd. This fall of the most blatant symbol of the world divide in this period of global cold war, more than a trigger, was rather a culmination. After Gorbachev’s perestroika, the relaxation of military control and the opening of borders in Poland and Hungary, the collapse of the Iron Curtain was only a matter of time. Even if the events in Berlin were locally a manifestation of great popular joy, it is not, however, what is retained here in the fifth movement: refusing a glorious final, Berlin 1989 is tainted with melancholy.

The reason for this choice is twofold and pertains both to the past and the future of history. Indeed, this newly gained freedom should not erase the memory of the dark decades, this ultimate struggle inevitably bearing the weight of its predecessors. Moreover, reunification proved far from being a magic solution for Germany (or Eastern Europe in general): 20 years later, the country still bears its scars. At the confluence of historical tensions and of those, musical, of Pictures of a Revolution, the vision of Berlin 1989 here is dark and dramatic – a certain cynical Slavic history should bear the blame.

Berlin 1989Berlin1989

24 Preludes after Chopin

admin — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 17:30:39 +0000

The 24 Preludes after Chopin are a set of original compositions based on textures and gestures taken from the piano original cycle of Chopin. The exercise is one of appropriation, where the objective is a symbiosis, a subtle shift from the first work. Following the stps of conceptual artists of the twentieth century ranging from Marcel Duchamp to Andy Warhol and Sherrie Levine, I do not seek to substitute myself to the action of the original composer, but rather to create a hybrid work.

The musical result, in a constant shifting state relative to the reference work, plays with the listener – although these Preludes can be listened to independently, these short pieces make sense if one is familiar with the original preludes, allowing a listening to the second degree. The displacement of style sometimes stays close to the original character, becomes sometimes more dramatic, sometimes humorous: a work that straddles the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, as a remix.

Prelude IPrélude I

Prelude II02 Prelude II

Prelude III03 Prelude III

Prelude IV04 Prelude IV

Prelude V05 Prelude V

Prelude VI06 Prelude VI

Prelude VII07 Prelude VII

Prelude VIII08 Prelude VIII

Prelude IX09 Prelude IX

Prelude X10 Prelude X

Prelude XI11 Prelude XI

Prelude XII 12 Prelude XII

Cantus

admin — Fri, 14 May 2010 22:50:27 +0000

Cantus for Gilles Tremblay, Cantus as canticle, Cantus firmus. Tremblay’s work reminds me a break-up, a formal shift, sparkling harmonies colored by the omnipresent shadow of faith. It is this same faith – in its spiritual essence rather than the concreteness of its Christianity – which has always attracted and fascinated me, be it in the works of Penderecki and Pärt, my mentors, or within of my own creation.

Religion is as much meditation as violence, and I can not conceive of music without violence. Violence in a silence, violence in a pianissimo. A contrast that crosses the three movements of the work through a writing which combines ancient and modern elements. From the neo-Gregorian monody of the first movement and its treatment in canon to the fugue that structures the race of the third is established a set of references interspersed with gestures bursting at the piano, woven into the web of strings. At the center of Cantus, a slow movement in sustained chords and silences, paradoxically the most intense of the three: without beginning or end, frozen in a timeless elegy.

The work, commissioned by the Contemporary Music Workshop of the University of Montreal under the direction of Lorraine Vaillancourt, was created April 6, 2010.