Eve Egoyan
piano
“Egoyan’s playing seems to spring a hinge between silence and sound, making audible the hyphen that links absence and presence...”
— Musicworks
Biography
Eve Egoyan is an artist whose medium is the piano. Her intense focus, command of the instrument, insightful interpretations, and unique programmes welcome audiences into unknown territory. She has recorded twelve solo CDs which have received accolades including "Best Classical" The Globe and Mail (1999) for her first solo CD, one of “Ten Top” classical discs, New Yorker magazine (2009), and “Top Classical Disc of the Year”, The Globe and Mail (2011). Presently, Eve is creating works combining acoustic piano and augmented piano, using new technologies to delve into the space Eve describes as “what a piano can do” and “what I wish a piano could do”. The creation of this enhanced piano opens new colour worlds for the piano. The source sound are the piano’s but modified. Eve works to improve gender equity in the world of contemporary music performance as a performer and as a voice in the community. She is one of Canada’s primary ambassadors for Canadian music abroad.
Programmes and projects
Solo for Duet
Solo for Duet is a deeply integrated virtuosic mix of sound, image, and unspoken narrative challenging traditional conceptions of piano and pianist, performed by Eve Egoyan. Animating the concert stage, Solo for Duet is an innovative, multi-sensory journey leading its audience through layered emotional musical worlds; contrastingly introspective, startling, playful, poetic, and urgent.
Eve Egoyan Plays Erik Satie
Dismissed as a bizarre eccentric by many, Erik Satie (1866-1925) has come to be seen as a key influence on twentieth century music. In later life he gathered round him “Les Six” and the cream of the new generation of French composers. His influence has continued to widen; John Cage and the New York School composers hailed him as “indispensable”, and more recently certain of his pieces have been seen as prefiguring both Minimalist and Ambient music.
Simple Lines of Enquiry
Simple Lines of Enquiry / Machine for Taking Time
This presentation is the meeting of two independent works of art; music by Anne Southam and film by David Rokeby. Each is an unfolding, across space and time, embracing extreme detail and timeless expansiveness. The held sonorities of the piano link seamlessly to the subtle shift of images through time. They are both gently emotional contemplations of transience; places of remembering and letting go.
Reviews
“Egoyan’s genius of being able to embody and translate notation into her own expression brought the work to life such that it felt like the two creators were merged into one.”
— Wendalyn Bartley,
June 2018
“With her fearless imagination, boundless sense of adventure and brilliant technique, Egoyan pushes beyond what seems possible on the piano. Floating melodies, expressive rhythmic shapes and ringing intervals plucked from the harmonic series weave a contemplative mood in both works, though disruptive undercurrents do intermittently surface.”
— Pamela Margles,
April 2018
“Egoyan displays an easy, unhurried flow of musical thought that seems to contradict the score from which she plays.”
— René Van Peer,
2018
About Maria de Alvear Recording
Collaborative works with Christopher Hinton
Eve Egoyan and digital artist Christopher Hinton experiment in the form of a dialogue: a "call and response". Christopher sends visual sequences and Eve responds with a musical phrase, or Eve sends a musical phrase and Christopher responds with visuals. An ongoing exploration.
Collaboration with artist Heather Nicol
Music from Armenia
Exploration of works by living Armenian composers and creation of a new work based on ancient Armenian sources. A sequel to Eve's programme The Crane, Armenian music for piano and violin.
The Augmented Piano
Exploring the space Eve describes as “what a piano can do” and “what I wish a piano could do”. Eve pairs acoustic piano with a physical modelling synthesizer whose physical and acoustic parameters can be manipulated to provide a real-time synchronized partnering voice which is both uncannily acoustic sounding yet flexible in ways that a real piano is not.
The most recent iteration of The Augmented Piano will be premiered at the 21C Festival in Toronto, January 2021.
Videos
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