Intimations of Luminous Clarity
LINK TO: Link
YEAR: 2013
ORCHESTRATION: Piano
DURATION: 5'
COMMISSIONED BY: The Royal Academy of Music
DEDICATION: Bernard Hughes
AVAILABILITY: Contact the Composer.
PREMIERE DATE: 21 August, 2013
PREMIERE INFORMATION:
Zubin Kanga, Piano
BBC Proms Plus Portrait Concert
Zubin Kanga, Piano
WORK NOTES:
“Often dazzling in its sonorities, Intimations of Luminous Clarity is derived from the piano-writing of the new orchestral work [Cave of Luminous Mind]. The musicians from the Royal Academy of Music gave their considerable all.”
Richard Whitehouse, CLASSICALSOURCE.COM, 21st August 2013
TEMPO - Quarterly Review of New Music (1 January 2014)
Reviewer: Paul Conway
Excerpt taken from the review ‘BBC Proms 2013: Diana Burrell, Harrison Birtwistle, Param Vir and Charlotte Seither’:
Setting a welcome precedent in this series, the programme also included the world premiere of a new work especially written for the event: commissioned by the Royal Academy of Music for the young pianist Zubin Kanga and dedicated to the composer Bernard Hughes, Intimations of Luminous Clarity takes as its starting point the piano part of Vir’s new Proms commission for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Cave of Luminous Mind. Having finished the orchestral work, the composer realised that the piano line contained its own integrity and form, and was ripe for further elaboration. The resulting three-minute piece is an intricate miniature written in one single span made up of brief, contrasting episodes, several of them involving hand-stopped notes. The overall effect was of an unbroken dialogue between bold, public statements and more introverted, internal ideas, subtly interrelated. Zubin Kanga’s committed reading kept the score’s overall line firmly in mind so that, despite a variegated, multi-sectional form, it never sounded episodic or disjointed.
