On November 20, 2020, Naïve Classiques will release a new album of works performed by David Greilsammer. LABYRINTH is a project that he has been developing since 2017 through a number of concerts given in New York, at the Ravinia Festival, in Lancaster and Sheffield, and at the Flagey in Brussels. LABYRINTH is an intimate new recital born out of a dream that had haunted Greilsammer for many years. Instead of allowing the dream to dominate his life, Greilsammer "decided to start searching for this labyrinth, in order to reconstruct it, and make it exist...to recreate the maze with music." The album is available now on streaming services in advance of the November 20 worldwide release.
"Despite its hypnotic appearance, the labyrinth is a structure that demands from its visitor to immediately act: once inside, you must move forward, go back, start again, observe, decide, change direction, run, stop abruptly, reflect, imagine, dream, hope, and reinvent yourself entirely," says Greilsammer. "When I decided to initiate this voyage with sounds, it seemed vital to present it with a series of chapters, like a novel, comprised of several short stories. This labyrinth is therefore made of seven musical chapters, intensely connected to one another - each one representing a new segment of the trip.
In LABYRINTH, the listener will encounter composers from every period and style, with whole works and ephemeral fragments cunningly interwoven. While revisiting music by Beethoven, Satie, Bach (J.S. and C.P.E.) and Lully, Greilsammer also performs George Crumb's mesmeric Magic Circle of Infinity, etudes by György Ligeti, Greilsammer's own piano arrangement of Marin Marais' Le Labyrinthe, and a new piano arrangement by Jonathan Keren of Chaos, a wild and unpredictable orchestral piece written in the 18th century by Jean-Féry Rebel.
Repetition Blindness by Ofer Pelz was commissioned to complete the program and has its premiere on LABYRINTH. Greilsammer selected works by Janáček and Scriabin - two visionary, daring and mystical composers -to portray the entry and exit gates of the maze, and chose Granados' Love and Death to represent the central, crucial moment of the dream. Unlike the six other chapters of the voyage - each one comprised of three parts - this chapter stands by itself in one segment, "like a solitary and luminous lighthouse, at the edge of a cliff, facing the immensity of the ocean."
In the new year, Greilsammer plans to perform this solo program in its entirety on a tour throughout the USA, Europe, and Asia.
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