Delights of my Life / In the Mirror of this Night

A NOTE ON THE LINEUP TONIGHT, AND WHAT TO EXPECT:

Doors will open at 7:30 (changed from earlier time of 7, as soundcheck is running a bit late!).

We're looking forward to sharing this evening of thoughtful, singular music with you.  The first piece, 'In the Mirror of this Night,' by Mark Ellestad, is a 45-minute, single-movement work for unamplified cello and violin.  It is remarkably quiet, with notable periods of silence.  As we are presenting the work within the beautiful but old and creaky Lantern Church, people walking and talking will be disruptively audible.  

We will start the Ellestad at 8:10PM SHARP!  We will then be closing and locking the outer doors, in order to protect a specific kind of listening experience.  We will open the doors after the piece has finished; the Eric Chenaux Trio's set will begin shortly after 9PM.

We've curated this evening as a 'total experience,' with the experience of the first work counterbalancing what you'll experience with the trio.  Mark's music is remarkable.  We highly encourage you to attend both sets, and to show up on time for the first piece!

Looking forward to listening together!

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For our 40th anniversary season finale we’ve curated a concert featuring two creators working at the iconoclastic outer edges of knowable form, both of whom might be accurately described as ‘virtuosically one-of-a-kind’.

Following the release of Eric Chenaux’s last album Say Laura (2022), The Guardian wrote “the Canadian songwriter has one of the all-time great singing voices in popular music, an intensely romantic Chet Baker-ish instrument that seems to float with piercing direction, like a paper aeroplane thrown hard through mist.” With Uncut describing his songcraft “as delicate and lovely as a rare orchid” and Record Collector praising the album’s “sublime alien balladry” such are the accolades that have accrued to Chenaux’s unique and consummately uncompromising solo music for well over a decade now.

The 2024 release Delights Of My Life opens a new chapter for the singer/guitarist and formally introduces the Eric Chenaux Trio with Toronto-based musicians Ryan Driver on Wurlitzer organ and Phillipe Melanson on electronic percussion. Driver is a longtime collaborator, appearing on several of Chenaux’s solo albums (even embedded into the very title of the 2010 masterpiece Warm Weather With Ryan Driver). Melanson has a long list of involvements that include Bernice, Joseph Shabason, and U.S Girls, and a recent release with his Impossible Burger project on Chenaux’s own experimental label Rat-drifting, but this marks the first fulsome involvement between the two as players on a recording.  

At New Works we are thrilled to be presenting the full band for this special Western Canada performance of music from Delights of My Life.

Calgarian Mark Ellestad, who many Calgarian musicians may know primarily as a recording engineer, Hardanger fiddle enthusiast, and for his wonderfully skilled musical offspring, Kris and Laura Ellestad, has been experiencing a slow-burning international renaissance of attentive listeners in recent years.  Mark and his compositions are closely connected to a group of aesthetically distinct Canadian experimental composers who studied under Rudolf Komorous at the University of Victoria during a particularly rich period of creative exchange between the mid-1970s and 80s. These include Martin Arnold (who co-founded Rat-drifting Records with Eric Chenaux), Jon Abram, Linda Catlin Smith, Allison Cameron, Stephen Parkinson, Christopher Butterfield, Owen Underhill, and others.  While each of these composers creates distinct work, there is an ‘aesthetic of the wonderful’, a reverence for meaningful experimental pathways and willingness to break conventional form that threads them together.

In 2022 acclaimed UK contemporary classical label Another Timbre released, ‘Discreet Angel,’ a newly-recorded compilation of works written by Ellestad between 1988 and 1994.  This remarkably-still collection features three composed works performed by Chilean guitarist Christian Alvéar and UK ensemble Apartment House (Mira Benjamin and Anton Lukoszevieze ), and one Hardinger piece performed by Ellestad himself.  Of the works Ellestad states, ‘I was deeply interested then—and remain so—in what is possible in music when it is pared down,’ says the composer, “when things that may sound familiar, in some ways, become transformed by the underlying intensity of a form that holds them together in unfamiliar ways. The works on Discreet Angel, the new CD, deal with balances between restriction in gesture and colour and flowing strangeness of form.”

For this concert we’ve selected the violin and cello duo In the Mirror of this Night, to be performed by Calgary violinist Laura Reid and Toronto cellist Margaret Gay.