It is rare that Centrediscs features foreign artists, so it is with pleasure that the label introduces one of France's most adventurous ensembles, the Trio des Iscles. This piano trio spent a residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts where they learned and recorded the repertoire featured on this recording, which includes the multi-award winning work Among Friends by the Toronto composer Chan Ka Nin, as well as works by four other Canadian composers.

Chan Ka Nin (b. 1949) - Chan Ka Nin was born in Hong Kong and moved with his family to Vancouver in 1965. After completing a science degree at the University of British Columbia, he went on to do a degree in music there under the tutelage of Jean Coulthard and Elliot Weisgarber. Chan’s post graduate studies were done at the University of Indiana where he obtained both a Master’s degree and a Doctorate of Music.

Chan Ka Nin has been commissioned by many ensembles across Canada including the Vancouver Bach Choir, Orchestra London Canada, the Esprit Orchestra, the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec, the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra and the CBC. As well, his music has been performed throughout Canada, the USA, Europe and the Far East. Chan’s music has won many prizes in Canada and abroad, including his clarinet trio version of Among Friends which won the prestigious Barlow International Chamber Music Competition and in March 1994 a recording of that work by the group Amici garnered a Juno Award for “Best Classical Composition”.

Among Friends - Written in 1989, this piece was originally composed for the composer’s colleagues at the University of Toronto, the Amici, whose name inspired the title and the spirit of the work.

Mr. Chan has commented on this work: “Chamber music is usually played ‘among friends’. In many ways, the musical relationship in a composition is similar to friendship: first there is the encounter of different individualistic personalities, then followed by interaction, conflict, and resolution. This scenario is reflected musically by a set of theme and variations based on the initial notes F-Bflat-Aflat. Friendship, like music, will last only through the test of time.”

Brent Lee (b. 1964) - Brent Lee is a Calgary composer and graduate of McGill University. His work ranges from orchestral music to electroacoustic pieces, and includes jazz compositions and music for theatre and dance. He has received awards or commissions from CAPAC, SOCAN, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Gaudeamus Foundation (Netherlands) and the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition (France). He is a member of the music faculty of Mount Royal College, Calgary and saxophonist with the composer/performer ensemble Modus Vivendi.

Maquette V - This piece is one of a series of works that take their title from the sculptor’s maquette which is a clay study made in preparation for a sculpture in marble or stone. While Lee’s maquettes are not strictly compositional studies, they have provided clues to the solution of technical and musical problems which have arisen in other works. Maquette V, written in 1987, was inspired (in part) by the klangfarbenmelodie (melody of tone colours) and canonic procedures of Webern’s Symphony, Op. 21.

Owen Underhill (b. 1954) - Owen Underhill, composer and conductor, lives in Vancouver where he is Artistic Director of Vancouver New Music, conductor of the Vancouver New Music Ensemble and Director of the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. Among his most recent compositions are an orchestral piece The Revealing, commissioned by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and premiered in its1996 New Music Festival; the opera The Star Catalogues, written with librettist Marc Diamond and produced by Vancouver New Music in 1994; and the orchestral work Lines of Memory which won first prize in the 1994 Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra du Maurier Arts Ltd. Canadian Composers’ Competition.

His compositions have been recorded on the Centrediscs and Artifact labels, and his most recent recording with the Vancouver New Music Ensemble is entitled Tree Line and is on CBC records.

Dompe - Mr. Underhill has this to say about his composition Dompe (1986): “A dompe, or as alternately spelled, dump or dumpe, is described by the Oxford dictionary as “an old dance of which nobody now knows anything except that the word is generally used in a way that suggests melancholy expression.” The elusive origins of the dompe are partly due to the minimum of extant examples, approximately fifteen. Most of these are English 16th century keyboard or lute music, almost all following variation structure over fixed bass patterns or grounds. My composition contains brief quotes from two of the more well known examples: My Lady Carey’s Dompe and the Irish Dumpe.

My Lady Carey’s Dompe is, to the best of my knowledge, the earliest known dompe and is one of the more extraordinary examples of early English keyboard music, dating from c. 1525. The Irish Dumpe was published in the extensive Elizabethan collection of English keyboard music, the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. This piece is not melancholy at all; “but then it is Irish” (to quote the Oxford Dictionary). Both works are anonymous.

My composition is related to the dompe in a tangential way. The title is used for historical reference to the quoted material, and there is a general sense of sectional variation in the work. The ambiguity of the meaning of the term and the shortage of existing examples appealed to me as a statement about the elusiveness and fragility of music. In the case of the dompe, many or most of the examples have been lost, as has much of the information concerning the genre.

The harmony of the piece is based on the concept of well tempered tuning, and moves back and forth from a ‘pure’ tonality that uses only five pitches to a more spicey and adventurous harmony that uses the remaining seven chromatic notes. It was written originally for my good friend Boyd McDonald and his Classical Trio.”

Barbara Monk Feldman (b. 1953) - Born in Québec, Barbara Monk Feldman studied composition with Bengt Hambraeus at McGill University, Montréal and with Morton Feldman at the State University of New York, Buffalo, where she completed her PH.D studies in 1987.

She has participated as guest composer in residence at universities in Canada and the United States and, most recently, at the Hochschüle der Künste in Berlin, where she has resided since 1994. Her music has been performed in Japan, North America and Europe, where her works have been recorded for radio broadcast. Her piano work The I and Thou is being recorded by Centrediscs for release in 1998.

Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano - Describing this work, Ms. Feldman writes: “The Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano is one of the first compositions where the experimentation in the work is focussed on the musical color. One of my goals is to vary the instrumental color so that the resulting musical time bears a correspondence to time in the visual arts. In this regard, notation remains the primary focus, during what then becomes a continuous search for musical metaphors for the following visual components in particular: surface, and slight distances between horizontal standing planes. I do not look for literal connection between these components and the music. What interests me is how the aspects are apprehended in time; how in a work of the painter Arshile Gorky, for example, a color or a line will vanish at the same time that it leaves the smallest trace of depth within the spaces of its own absence, or how a color will appear larger than the space which contains it. The process which unites musical colors with their placement in time is intended to be closely related to the movement of the eye over a picture plane.” The work was composed in 1984.

Andrew MacDonald (b. 1958) - Born in Guelph, Andrew P. MacDonald earned a Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition at the University of Michigan in 1985, where he studied with William Bolcom. For the past decade his compositions have been winning prestigious prizes in Canada and abroad: the 1997 International Clarinet Association Composition Competition; the du Maurier Arts Ltd. Canadian Composers Competition; and the Triennial Washington International Competition for Composition for String Quartet, to name a few. A number of his compositions have been recorded on the Société Nouvelle d’Enregistrement, New Music Manitoba and BIS (Sweden) labels, and are published by New Art Music Editions (Winnipeg) and Vierdreiunddreissig Musikverlag (Munich). He is also active as a concert guitarist, as artistic director of Ensemble Musica Nova and as professor of composition and theory at Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Québec.

In the Eagle’s Eye - Written in 1995 at the request of the Gryphon Trio, this piece was generously supported by the Laidlaw Foundation. Inspired by the Gryphon Trio’s name, MacDonald set about composing a piece which would approximate how experience might be perceived from the perspective of an eagle. It is an exploration of the perception of distance and magnification, as this magnificent bird, soaring high in the sky, discerns movement below and focuses the image with its prodigious visual acuity. This action is realized musically throughout the work as motives expand, contract and fragment providing resolution of detail and metamorphosis of image.

The work is set as one movement in four major sections (slow-fast; slow-fast) with moods varying from the tranquility and ecstasy of high altitude flight to the vicious, but necessary aggression closer to the earth. MacDonald dedicated all the rushing of wings and the pure contemplation of soaring above the clouds in this piece to the members of the Gryphon Trio, Annalee Patipatanikoon, Roman Borys and Jamie Parker.

Trio des Iscles

Formed in 1988, the Trio des Iscles from France comprizes violinist Pierre-Olivier Queyras, cellist Véronique Marin and pianist François Daudet.

Born in Pertuis (Vaucluse) in 1964, Pierre-Olivier Queyras began studying the violin at the age of four and a half. Throughout his training as a musician, he has had many distinguished teachers, among them Lorand Fenyves, Janos Starker and Marie-Annick Nicolas to name a few. Apart from his activities in the field of chamber music, he has appeared as a soloist with a number of orchestras including the Bader-Badener Orchester and the Orchestre philharmonique de France. He is currently a teacher in the E.N.M. of Châteauroux and a soloist member of the Ensemble FA that devotes itself to contemporary music.

Born in Niamey (Niger) in 1962, Véronique Marin began playing the cello at the age of twelve. A pupil of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, she was awarded 1st Prize (cello) in 1984, and later earned herself the “Special Prize” in the international Pablo Casals Contest in Budapest. She has played a large number of concerts as a soloist with various orchestras in France and Austria, in recital, and in chamber music ensembles. She is a teacher at the Conservatory of Vernon, and since 1990, has been a soloist of the Ensemble FA.

Born in Lyon in 1965, François Daudet began his serious studies at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, where he was awarded a 1st Prize of Piano. He has appeared as a soloist on various occasions with orchestras, and since 1987 has also devoted himself to chamber music. More recently in the 1990s, he teamed up with violinist Marie-Annick Nicolas to give a series of highly successful concerts. In 1991, the Fondation de France awarded Mr. Daudet the “Charles Oulmont” prize for his overall activities as soloist and chamber player.