releases


Joana Sá
Through this Looking-Glass
DVD + CD
(blink 001)
LC 24963
Release: 27.04.2011
Running time: 46,09 Min.

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Joana Sá Piano

Through this Looking-Glass
for prepared piano, electronics, mobile, toy piano and props
Music und concept: Joana Sá
Director: Daniel Neves
Recording and mixing: Angelo Lourenço und Eduardo Raon
Mobile: Rita Sá

Trailer:


 

 

through this looking glass is a piece by Joana Sá for prepared piano, toy piano, electronics, props and a mobile, with strong scenic and performance features. Inspired by the surreal and dreamlike world of Lewis Carroll and exploring the relationship between music and poetry, the piece is divided into two different parts:

1. ‘13 mini(cre)atures for Robert Schumann’
2. ‘Freedom means little. What I desire still has no name’.

While traveling ‘through this looking glass’, one encounters creatures made of sound making their way through different musical logics in a bizarre and hypnotizing world. Joana slides into, beneath, in between and outside the piano as one who searches for the hidden logics, bowels and a forgotten childhood of this instrument that has become, because of its historical importance, of an almost untouchable ‘severity’. After all, the piano can. And the pianist can too.

The performance through this looking glass was captured by the film director and cinematographer Daniel Neves into a black and white movie with the same title.  Daniel closely follows and transforms every musical gesture into unique pictures of sensitive and depurated aesthetic. Whether it is music that we see or images that we hear, we’ll never know. There’s no line that divides or designates territories: Joana and Daniel build something hardly definable yet overwhelming and original. through this looking glass is released as DVD+CD.

Reviews:

Es gibt nicht sehr viele Musik-DVDs, die mit einer ausgesprochen eigenen Ästhetik Furore zu machen in der Lage sind. […] Dies ist die erste Produktion des Labels „blinker – Marke für Rezentes“ in Köln. Die erste Produktion wird nur schwer zu übertreffen sein.

(Martin Hufner, NMZ)

 

[…] It is a work of great charm. It is sound poetry. It is one of the most successful and attractive high modern keyboard works that I've heard in years. Joana Sa must be appreciated if you want to know where modernism has gone. It's here. […]

(Grego Applegate Edwards, http://classicalmodernmusic.blogspot.com)

 

[…] Das vielstimmige Klangspektrum lässt oft überhaupt nicht mehr an Klavier denken. […] Dem Hörer erschließt sich so ein wie im Spiegelkabinett unendlich gebrochener Kosmos des scheinbar so vertrauten Klaviers. […]

(Rainer Nonnenmann, Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger)


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