Ian Pace: New Japanese Piano Music, Ravel and Boulez

Please note: this event is now fully booked.

Admission

General admission: £5 - please sign up to attend here.
City students, staff, unwaged and concessions: Free admission - please sign up to attend here.

Programme

• Maurice Ravel, Gaspard de la nuit (1908)
• Takuya Imahori, Capriccio itaparicano, op. 69 (2024) (UK Premiere)
• Muneaki Tsuda, Moebius (2024) (UK Premiere)
• Takeo Hoshiya, Saṃkalpaka (2024) (UK Premiere)
• Yasutaki Inamori, Klavieretüden, Zweites Heft (2024) (UK Premiere)
• Pierre Boulez, Piano Sonata No. 2 (1948)

In this concert, Ian Pace presents four recent piano works from Japan, all written for and premiered by him during a 2024 concert tour of the country. Takuya Imahori’s Capriccio itaparicano draws upon a range of Brazilian popular and vernacular idioms; Muneaki Tsuda’s Moebius is a quietist, modal quasi-minimalist work which is nonetheless intricate and sometimes intense; Takeo Hoshiya’s Saṃkalpaka employs constructivist material within a type of musical diary format; while Yasutaki Inamori’s Klavieretüden employ a range of late modernist harmonic and gestural languages within recognisable genres – the humoresque, arabesque, pittoresque and burlesque. These works are bookended by two twentieth-century French masterpieces – Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, about which Ian Pace has recently presented papers surveying the recorded legacy, married to graphic analysis and considerations of performance practice, and Pierre Boulez’s ferocious and uncompromising Piano Sonata No. 2.