Fiery Eve Egoyan keys into a legacy with Simple Lines of Enquiry
Was inspired, in part, by mid-20th-century modernism; its notes are derived from the intellectually rigorous contemplation of 12-tone theory. It draws on late-20th-century minimalism, too, in its simplicity and lack of explicit emotional content. Yet it’s forward-thinking in how it leaves many performance decisions up to its interpreter, and timeless in its beauty.
The piece mainly concerns itself with what happens to notes after they’ve been struck: how sounds blend and then fall into inaudibility as the piano’s strings slowly stop vibrating. Given that Southam finished the work toward the end of her life, it’s easy to hear it as elegiac, yet Egoyan stresses that if the composer was contemplating mortality, it was on an abstract level.
“You can never sustain a note on a piano; you’re always working on something that’s going away,” the pianist offers. “And I think that, on a certain level, that’s our shared experience as human beings. We’re always in a state of decay.”
Source: Straight.com