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 intuitive musicality, insightful attention to detail, and pianistic virtuosity have made her one of the world’s most sought-after interpreters of contemporary music.
Eve has released eleven critically acclaimed solo discs, ten of works by living composers and one disc of works by Erik Satie. Recent releases include Thought and Desire, works by Linda Catlin Smith, and her most recent album, De Puro Amor & En Amor Duro, two large-scale works by Maria de Alvear, described as "stunning" by The Whole Note and "absolutely spellbinding" by Musicworks.
Eve's most recent project is a concert-length production melding sound and images entitled SOLO FOR DUET. She also presents a variety of programmes entitled The Augmented Piano which expand and re-imagine the possibilities of the traditional acoustic piano, as well as solo recitals around the music of Erik Satie, and recitals of works by living composers written for Eve.
Programmes and projects
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.
Multimedia works for disklavier (an acoustic piano with a computer interface), multimedia works for acoustic piano, or a mix of both. Repertoire variable with each performance; sample selection:
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Duet for solo piano (for sampling disklavier), Composer: Eve Egoyan
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Homonymy (prepared disklavier, voice, movement and video), Composer/ Artist: John Oswald
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Surface Tension (disklavier and real-time video), Co-creators: Eve Egoyan/David Rokeby
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Palimpia (disklavier), Composer: John Oswald
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Constellations (piano and sine tones), Composer: Chiyoko Szlavnics
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David Lynch Études (amplified piano, amplified voice/foot stomping/guitar and soundtrack with video), Composer: Nicole Lizée
Simple Lines of Enquiry / Machine for Taking Time
This presentation is the meeting of two independent works of art; the music and video are not explicitly synchronized, but move through time in compatible ways that enliven each other. Both works involve a process of unfolding - a camera pans across a city and across time; the music explores of the emotional possibilities of a twelve-interval row. Each embraces extreme detail and timeless expansiveness. The held sonorities of the piano link seamlessly to the subtle pan/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
MUSICWORKS
“Egoyan’s playing seems to spring a hinge between silence and sound, making audible the hyphen that links absence and presence... Egoyan’s interpretive grace collude in that remarkable and recurrent alchemy which keeps piano music fresh and vital despite the daunting weight of its history.”
— Julian Cowley,
2016
