Halifax pianist Dinuk Wijeratne is welcoming an old friend
and artistic ally, clarinetist Kinan Azmeh, to town. Sri Lankan-born
and Dubai-raised Wijeratne and Syrian Azmeh met at Juilliard’s
International House. “It was this international residence in the heart
of New York. It was a huge mansion-looking building,” says Wijeratne,
with “people from about 100 different nationalities and from different
fields.”
There, Azmeh performed in a concert series that Wijeratne
programmed. “You had all this time for rehearsal, to talk about music
and film and all these cool things,” Wijeratne says. “And then after
the concert you’d get to sit down with people who were actually
filmmakers or scientists.”
On Friday, he and Azmeh present the Canadian premiere of Complex
Stories, Simple Sounds, their new release on the Incognito label.
The pair has performed these compositions in the US, in Beirut, Paris,
across the Middle East and soon will premiere it at the Berlin
Philharmonie.
The album was recorded in December 2007 during a day-long session at
Lunenburg’s St. John’s Anglican Church.
“They have one of the finest pianos in the province,” says
Wijeratne. “[St. John’s} doesn’t have a typically church acoustic.”
He refers to it as being “very dry,” meaning “there’s not much
reverb in the sound. It doesn’t echo. So you can enhance the sound in
post-production. We preferred that.”
Complex Stories is comprised of three original compositions
by Wijeratne, two by Azmeh, an improvisation based on a Béla
Bartók piece, a remix of track five, “Something There,” by Umut
Gökçen and an electroacoustic collaboration between Azmeh
and Gökçen, called “Resuf.”
The recording’s first two tracks, Wijeratne’s favourites, present a
portrait of each musician’s compositional character. Wijeratne
describes his opener, “The Learning Curve,” as “more dark and intense”
than the second piece, Azmeh’s “Ibn Arabi’s Postlude,” but, he adds,
“If you invest yourself in the beginning, you get taken all the way
through. There’s a strong arc there.”
Despite their musical differences, the two friends share a love of
film, especially Hitchcock. Like the cinematic master, the duo creates
and sustains suspense in the music, emphasizing “the approach” over the
arrival at the critical moment. When resolutions are reached, they’re
not obvious payoffs. “You’re always conscious of not giving away too
much too soon, which is exactly the way a filmmaker would think,” says
Wijeratne.
He and Azmeh improvised most of the material during recording,
bringing in Indian rhythms and Middle Eastern modes and weaving
patterns of repetition and variation. Wijeratne also enlisted Azmeh to
provide music for this weekend’s Flamenco Con Fusion II, featuring the
Maria Osende Flamenco Company, Alex Condo (piano) and Haggai Cohen Milo
(bass).
“Flamenco came from a lot of Indian and Middle Eastern influences
originally because of the Moors,” Wijeratne points out. As well,
flamenco draws out tension. “The atmosphere is very intense. It’s
really explosive,” Wijeratne says. “Everything is so contained and
compressed. So the idea is that you create tension by giving the
impression that something is going to explode, but it never does—or
maybe once, kind of like a Hitchcock film.”
This article appears in Oct 22-28, 2009.
