Threads: Music for Voice and Piano

David Ryan has curated this evening featuring performances of his recent works for voice and piano together with two pieces by the American composer Terry Jennings.

The ‘threads’ of the title refers to the interconnection of poetic texts, from contemporary author Martha Kapos, to Richard Brautigan, Walt Whitman, all the way back to ancient Greek and Roman epigrams, resulting in the songs themselves being an interweaving through these different temporalities and approaches to sound. It also refers to the inclusion of two piano pieces by Terry Jennings. Jennings is the least known of the minimalist innovators of the 1960s, but he was an important and influential part of the La Monte Young/Yoko Ono scene of the early 1960s; his music remains seldom performed and unpublished, although it has a hypnotic and tranquil beauty. Significant works by Jennings will be featured in each half of the concert, Winter Sun (1965) and Winter Trees (1966). Ryan has commented, “I see Jennings’ music as a thread, even if from a very different perspective, connecting with my own approach to sound and space in composition, and so brings here an archival connection to this current project”. 

Cristina Grifone has performed with leading ensembles including the Nuova Orchestra Alessandro Scarlatti, Musica Fiorita Ensemble and Orchestra, and Antonio Florio’s I Turchini, for many concerts. She has also been involved, in parallel, with contemporary music. Recordings have featured her singing Handel, Veneziano, Cimarosa, Perti, and Porpora for Glossa, Pan Classics, and Brilliant Classics labels.  

Paul Jackson is a pianist, conductor, musicologist and lecturer, based in Cambridge, UK. He has performed many modern and contemporary works including concertos by Stravinsky, Bartok and orchestral works by Berio. An authority on the music of the Australian composer, Percy Grainger, he is Editor of The Grainger Journal and President of the Percy Grainger Society, based in New York.

David Ryan is a visual artist as well as improvising musician. Although mainly autodidact as a composer, he received some lessons from jazz musician Don Rendell. Recent compositions include Aphorisms 1-3, (2019 – 22) Fields and Refrains (2021) and Inscriptions (2021–2022) which has been recently performed at Ljubljana City Museum, Slovenia and Schrattenbach Opera, Olomouc, Czech Republic.