Cori O'Lan

Piano Sonata, Philip Glass, 2019
Piano: Maki Namekawa
Realtime Visualization: Cori O’Lan
Piano Sonata by Philip Glass has been commissioned by Klavier-Festival Ruhr, Ars Electronica, Philharmonie de Paris,
Performances at Ars Electronica 2019 and Tokyo Midtown Festival 2020 were supported by Yamaha.
In 2020 Maki Namekawa recorded the Piano Sonata for CD

Here is a live-video from the performance at the Ars Electronica Home Delivery Concerts on March 12th, 2021

Photos from the performance at Tokyo Midtown Festival, Feb 2020 (with a smaller 2screen setup)

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Photos from the performance at Ars Electronica 2019, 09.09.2019 (with a large 3screen wide setup) 

about the music:
“The Sonata is colorful, wild, excitingly jumpy…” – with these words Malte Hemmerich begins his review of the premiere of Philip Glass’s latest work at the Klavier-Festival Ruhr on July 4th 2019 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He further continues “… it is a prime example of Philip Glass’s piano music with its opposing rhythms, and there are also many other familiar elements from the composer’s etudes and individual works. In such a wild kaleidoscope, however, they appear here for the first time.
It is Glass’s most demanding piano work to date; the rapid succession of virtuoso octave jumps are close to the limit of playability. Namekawa breathes this music, the piece is an example of how an incomparable unity can arise from the close collaboration between composer and interpreter.”

Screenshots:

1. Movement

2. Movement

3. Movement

L’Oiseau de Feu (The Firebird), Igor Stravinsky
Arrangement for piano four hands: Dennis Russell Davies
Piano: Maki Namekawa & Dennis Russell Davies
Realtime Visualisation: Cori O’Lan
performed at Ars Electronica 2019 and at the Ars Electronica Home Delivery Concerts 2020

Video from the Concert at Ars Electronica Postcity 2019:

Video from the Ars Electronica Home Delivery Concert 2020:

 

The full visualisation with the music from the CD-recording of Dennis Russell Davies and Maki Namekawa:

The screen at the performance was approx. 20 x 4 m big with 3 HD laser projectors (5760×1200). So the video here is comparatively very small. Please watch it in full screen mode with highest possible resolution. (The first 2 minutes of the video are very dark so you might want to jump a bit forward)

about the music:
In 1909, when Igor Stravinsky began to work on the music for the ballet The Firebird, which Sergei Diaghilev had commissioned for his Ballets Russes, he was still a young and little-known composer. The premiere of The Firebird in Paris in 1910, which was equally celebrated by audiences and critics, suddenly made the 27-year-old Igor Stravinsky internationally famous.
With his complex rhythms and extraordinary tonal effects of the great orchestra, Stravinsky created a surprising and gripping characterization of the mystical story of Ivan Zarevich, who defeats the evil sorcerer Kaschej and his demons with the help of the firebird.
Dennis Russell Davies built his arrangement for piano four-hands on Stravinsky’s piano score and it is amazing how varied and sensitive he succeeds in transferring the effect of the overwhelming, colorful richness of the orchestral sounds into the fragility of the piano sound. Reduced to the elementary sound, it opens up a persuasive path to the essence of Stravinsky’s great composition.

about the visuals:
As always in my collaborations with Dennis Russell Davies and Maki Namekawa, the visualizations are real-time graphics, i.e. there are no prepared videos or image sequences that are synchronized to the music. It is only the sound of the piano directly picked up over two microphones, which is analyzed by computer and thus provides the parameters with which the graphics are generated, animated and modified – live in the moment of the performance.
The very dance-like animations of the graphic elements designed to correspond to The Firebird ballet and its characters are derived exclusively from the sound spectrum and dynamics of the music, without motion tracking or keyframe animation. The parameters derived from the music are directly assigned to various parameters of physics-based simulation models, particle systems as well as to the geometries, colors and lights, etc.

Photos from the performance at Ars Electronica Festival (09.09.2019)

Screenshots:

The Berlioz Project has been created for Ars Electronica‘s Big Concert Night, Sep. 2018, in collaboration with Bruckner Orchestra Linz, Markus Poschner, Norbert Trawöger, Silke Grabinger, Martin Honzik, Karl Schmidinger, Joshi Viteka, Hannes Franks, Johannes Braumann, Peter Freudling.

A central element of the special stage setting was the heavy duty industrial robot KUKA-KR600 which weighs more than 2,5 tons and is 3,3 m high when fully stretched.

The robot was placed in the middle of the stage, surrounded by the orchestra and the motors of its 6 axis were directly controlled by the music of the orchestra – the same data which were used for the digital realtime visualisation.

The realtime visuals were presented on 6 large screens, surrounding the orchestra and the robot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the 3rd movement of Symphonie Fantastique we developed a special system where the music was controlling the movements of the robot and the robot sent his position-data to move and synchronize 4 moving-head lights and also to control the position of the realtime-visuals on the screens.

Realtime Visualisation for the 3rd Movement. The position of this orange square was directly controlled by the position-data coming from the robot. All other modifications were controlled by the music-signal from the orchestra.