Silver Lining Suite
HIROMI: THE PIANO QUINTET FT. PUBLIQUARTET
SEP 8-11 | OPENING WEEK WITH HIROMI
SEP 10 - SEP 11, 2022
Miner Auditorium
Original show description below.
For the second half of our Season-opening week, Hiromi presents the West Coast premiere of her new project, pairing her incomparable piano mastery with string quartet featuring PUBLIQuartet.
In the two decades since Hiromi released her stunning Ahmad Jamal-produced debut album Another Mind, the Japanese pianist/composer has blazed an incandescent trail across the jazz scene. Her fecund imagination and boundless creatively seem to ripple out of her hands as effortlessly as her virtuosic pianism. Equally formidable in acoustic or electric settings, she delves into a different kind of fusion on her latest project.
Recorded in pandemic isolation and released in fall 2021, her Telarc album Silver Lining Suite marks a major creative leap for Hiromi, who composed the titular four-movement work for piano and string quartet. Drawing on European classical forms, the music is highly melodic, intricately arranged, emotionally intense, and unmistakably born from the mind of an intrepid improviser. Interacting with the strings, she attacks the piano with all the dynamism and unbridled energy that’s marked her music from the beginning. The suite evokes the whipsawed pandemic experience, from the initial shock and despair as the world shut down to the relief and welcome connection provided by the technology-facilitated silver lining of livestream performance.