SAWYERS Hommage to Kandinsky

Philip Sawyers, Visiting Composer

British composer Philip Sawyers is our visiting composer this season. There is an interview with him as part of our Virtual Symposium here. This piece was to be paired with Mahler’s Second Symphony at the culminating performance of MahlerFest XXXIII.

Using a Mahlerian musical language for our time, Hommage to Kandinsky is Sawyers’s response to an exhibition of works by Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky, like Messiaen, had a condition known as synesthesia, in which the brain joins and mixes different senses. For Kandinsky, all colors had a sound and all sounds had a color (See “Envisioning Mahler”). Sawyers translates Kandinsky’s visual works back into sound, wrestling with both what the paintings unlocked in himself and what he imagined Kandinsky might have been experiencing during their creation.

View the interview where Sawyers talks about this piece that aired on Wednesday here.

An essay: Philip Sawyers “Hommage to Kandinsky”, An Exploration of the Score by Kenneth Woods, on the MahlerFest blog here.

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To be released on Friday, May 15, 2020 at 3:30 PM MDT.

This is a preivew of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales‘s audio recording under the baton of Kenneth Woods

And here is an interview with Philip Sawyers, talking about the genesis of Hommage to Kandinsky

Click here to view the full 2020 Virtual Colorado MahlerFest schedule.

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