On Saturday, November 25th, two singular pianists join forces to celebrate the work of southern Ontario composers, Ann Southam, Carol Ann Weaver and Juliet Palmer. Soloists Amelia Grace Yates and Adam Sherkin take up the challenge.

An unlikely champion of minimalist aesthetic, Ann Southam worked tirelessly throughout her career, experimenting with style and structure, always staying true to her own voice and musicality. Later in life, as she embraced minimalism – particularly at the keyboard – she navigated her own brand of lyricism, intimacy and efficiency of line not only as feminist, but as an individual artist born of unquestionably North American sensibilities. She advocated for women in the arts and cultivated her own – very unique – career, all the while cohabitating a compositional world heavily dominated by men. CBC Producer Eitan Cornfield once said: “Ann Southam blasts the stereotype of the Canadian composer. She is proudly, politically female, in a stuffy male universe.”

Dedicated to her grandmother, Juliet Palmer’s Aquamarine celebrates “the tension between the piano’s percussive mechanism and the fluidity of water.” In an extended piano work where “watery fragments from the musical past refract and reflect,” Palmer weaves a unique musical narrative from the beginning of this millenium: rembereing the past and inquiring – urgently – about the present and future.

 

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Programme:

ANN SOUTHAM:

Four Bagatelles,

Rivers IV (2nd Set), Rivers III and IV (3rd Set)

Pond Life I, II and III

Fiddle Creek and Fidget Creek

Three In Blue

 

CAROL ANN WEAVER:

Spirit Unbound (2021)

 

JULIET PALMER:

Aquamarine (2005)

 

ADAM SHERKIN:

This Constant Song* (Homage to Southam, 2023)

Daycurrents, Op. 14 (2009)

 

* world premiere