Emerging from collaborative saxophone and piano improvisation sessions during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, these pieces explore the sonic and expressive possibilities of this partnership. Each piece is a musical caricature, the composer imagining his fanciful birds as larger-than-life cartoon characters represented by musical moods and gestures that are at times correspondingly exaggerated for comic or tender effect. The pieces in Book 2 exhibit a range of contrasting but complementary moods. In “Stoned Vulture”, the piano and saxophone trade languid, cascading lines; “Mobster Magpie” is a jazzy moto perpetuo; in “Baby Phoenix”, strange otherworldly calls emanate from the saxophone’s mouthpiece, accompanied by Aeolian harp sounds strummed within the piano; the saxophone’s “Sedated Seagull“ floats dreamily above limpid piano chords that traverse the piano’s full register; and “Paranoid Hummingbird” alternates nervous, disjointed, darting motifs with implacable, motoric rhythms.
Adventurous performers will relish the scope the composer offers throughout these pieces to exercise their own creative freedom of interpretation. While each collection forms a satisfying group when performed as whole, individual pieces will make a pleasingly quirky contribution to a recital.
Vincent Ho is a Canadian who is widely recognised as one of the most exciting composers of his generation. He has made waves in the music world of North America despite being fairly early in his compositional career, receiving numerous prizes, accolades, and prominent commissions in a relatively short space of time. Ho’s music is rich and energetic - a unique integration of influences ranging from the visual arts, electroacoustic and natural soundscapes, traditional classical music forms, and the physical properties of the instruments and ensembles for which he writes. His music is sensual, sonorous and richly textured, and Ho gives considerable attention to the audience’s experience of his intricate sound-worlds.
