Returnings

This latest release by renowned pianist Eve Egoyan features world première recordings of four works by the late Ann Southam, one of Canada’s finest composers.

“[These pieces] have the admirable gravitas and serenity of a full life well lived. They, along with Southam’s Simple Lines of Enquiry, should take their rightful place in the top tier of contemporary concert piano repertoire.” — Andrew Timar, The WholeNote

The Year’s Best Music:
“So different from the joyful minimalism of her earlier music, the late Ann Southam’s final works for piano, written for Eve Egoyan, are spare and haunting, inhabiting a circumscribed world where the expressive resonance of even the simplest music element is questioned, and where resolution is always possible but rarely permanent.” – Elissa Poole, The Globe and Mail, December 26th, 2011

The CD works marvelously as a whole, to the extent that you might find yourself hard-pressed not to consider this one single composition. Each of these four pieces seems to grapple with its own internal conflict: consonance and dissonance, minimalism and dodecaphony, or restraint and restlessness. What makes this conflict work, and what draws the listener, is that these conflicts never resolve. Southam merely presents these seemingly disparate ideas one against another and lets them be, never allowing one to dominate, and to great effect. – Andy Lee, Sequenza21

Eve Egoyan specializes in the performance of new works and her Simple Lines of Enquiry, a piano solo by Ann Southam, was selected as one of the New Yorker magazine’s Top Ten Recordings of 2009.

Works/Tracks

1. Returnings I
2. In Retrospect
3. Qualities of Consonance
4. Returnings II: A Meditation

PERFORMERS

Eve Egoyan