Angele David-Guillou - En Mouvement on CD

Description

Eager to explore her metier further and experiment in particular with the resonance of the piano as a compositional tool, in 2015 David-Guillou set out to purchase a grand piano. After many a pianistic encounter across the length and breadth of Britain, she eventually discovered an August Förster model built in the early 1980s, in what was then East Germany, and immediately knew it was the one. A sublime instrument, with an incredibly sensuous bass and rich harmonics, the piano would provide the foundation for a set of ambitious new compositions, later interleaved with David-Guillou's intricate arrangements for saxophones, woodwind and strings, that would eventually make up the 'En Mouvement' album. Informed by a rich and eclectic tapestry of cultural stimuli, including Philip Glass's 'Glassworks,' the music for movement of Thomas De Hartmann and George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, Alvin Curran's compositions for the piano, French and Spanish Baroque music, the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Jean Cocteau, Sufi writings, Sumerian art and contemporary dance, the pieces on 'En Mouvement' are the work of a reflective, intellectually engaged yet delightfully instinctive modern composer who has made the limitless mutability implied by the concept of 'movement' a thing of personal transformation and mesmeric musicality. "Very early on in the process of working on the compositions for this album, the idea of 'movement' became my central point of focus", David-Guillou confirms. "The word seemed to encapsulate all my obsessions. En mouvement literally means 'in motion', but the word in French, as in English, is extremely rich and suggests an array of ideas such as motion, gesture, dance, musical parts, clockwork, repetition, displacement, emotional confusion or excitement. I hadn't previously understood how important this concept was to me." With her second album of modern composition, Angele David-Guillou's career is palpably en movement, and, excitingly, it feels like the beginning of a long and thrillingly creative musical journey.