Tristan, Isolde

A video documentation of a live performance of the following works:
Marc Sabat, Tristan, Isolde (2009), for two pianos retuned in Just Intonation
Rodney Sharman, 'Tristan und Isolde' (2013) from Opera Transcriptions

During my Residency at the Banff Center of Arts in 2014, the Canadian composer Marc Sabat was the visiting artist for a week. Sabat’s piece Tristan, Isolde, for two pianos tuned differently, was composed in 2009 for Akademie Schloss Solitude’s 20th year anniversary and uses only the ‘Tristan’ chord in inversions throughout the piece. As a result, for the programming of a concert I combined Sabat’s piece Tristan, Isolde – performed with pianist Lara Dodds-Eden – with Sharman’s ‘Tristan und Isolde’ transcription without a break between them in an attempt to combine the two pieces that refer to the beginning and the end of Wagner’s opera respectively. Moreover, I asked soprano Julia Fox, who was to sing the three last notes of Isolde, to stand behind the stage (behind a wooden panel that was surrounding the stage) and sing from the background without being visible to the audience. Different positions were attempted during the rehearsal, such as having Fox sitting in the audience, or on stage from the beginning. Nevertheless, the idea of keeping the soprano away from the eyes of the audience formed, in my view, a less conventional situation and excluded the possibility of distracting the audience. Having the soprano sitting within the audience would inevitably activate movement from the audience in order to trace the singer. But I aspired the opposite, a moment of stillness, by creating an atmosphere of sudden familiarity, which would still be absent from a visual perspective.

Lara Dodds-Eden & Ann-Kristin Sofroniou, piano
Julia Fox, soprano
Banff Centre of Arts, January 2014