Metamorphoses

Rising Canadian pianist Chloé Dumoulin explores musical transformation in Liszt, Bartók, Gougeon and Corigliano.
About this Event

Metamorphoses

The Master Piano Recital Series welcomes rising Canadian pianist for a compelling program exploring the idea of musical transformation, culminating in one of the great monuments of the piano repertoire: Liszt's Sonata in B minor.

Named one of CBC's "30 hot Canadian classical musicians under 30", Dumoulin is quickly establishing herself as one of the most promising Canadian pianists of her generation. Her international career has already taken her across Canada, the United States, Europe and Asia, with performances at Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, the Barbican Centre, the National Arts Centre and Salle Bourgie. She has appeared as soloist with the Orchestre Métropolitain, Orchestre symphonique de Laval and Orchestre symphonique de Drummondville, and as a chamber musician alongside artists including Emmanuel Pahud, Kerson Leong and Stéphanie Tétreault.

A graduate of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, where she studied with Ronan O'Hara and subsequently served as a Junior Fellow, Dumoulin is also a faculty pianist at Domaine Forget and Orford Musique. Her debut recording, Nouveau lyrisme, with violist Frédéric Lambert, was nominated for Album of the Year at the Prix Opus.

Hear Chloé Dumoulin in performance:

Metamorphoses brings together music spanning more than a century around a shared fascination with transformation: the ways a gesture, melody, pattern or sound can change its shape, colour and character while retaining traces of what it once was.

Liszt's Jeux d'eau à la Villa d'Este transforms the movement of water into shimmering, ever-changing musical textures, while Canadian composer Denis Gougeon's Piano-Soleil turns light itself into a source of colour and energy. Bartók draws traditional Hungarian melodies into his own striking musical language in the Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs, reshaping them through rhythm, harmony and virtuosity.

In John Corigliano's Fantasia on an Ostinato, a repeating pattern becomes the foundation for an extraordinary process of musical transformation, shifting between pulse, tension and freedom.

The journey culminates in Liszt's monumental Sonata in B minor. Constructed from a small collection of musical ideas that are continually transformed and reimagined, the Sonata unfolds as a vast dramatic architecture encompassing lyricism, virtuosity, fragility and tremendous power.

From water and light to folk song and ostinato, and ultimately to the extraordinary architecture of Liszt's Sonata, Metamorphoses invites us to hear music as something continually becoming—one idea giving birth to another.

Program

• Franz Liszt — Jeux d'eau à la Villa d'Este
• Denis Gougeon — Piano-Soleil
• Béla Bartók — Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs, Op. 20
• John Corigliano — Fantasia on an Ostinato
• Franz Liszt — Piano Sonata in B minor, S. 178

Learn more:
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