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Lei Liang's Messages of White Debuts with PRISM Quartet and Music From China

Feb. 01, 2012

Lei Liang's <em>Messages of White</em> Debuts with PRISM Quartet and Music From China

Lei Liang sees the premiere of his newest work, Messages of White, on February 3 at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall. Messages of White is a striking piece that fuses elements of Eastern and Western instruments and traditions. Scored for saxophone quartet, Chinese ensemble (erhu, sheng, pipa, yangqin), and percussion, the work is given its premiere performance by the PRISM Quartet and the ensemble Music From China. The concert marks the first collaboration of these two ensembles since their acclaimed 2009 recording, Antiphony, and ensuing tour.

Liang comments:

Messages of White was composed during my residency at the American Academy in Rome. I learned that the magnificent Santa Maria Maggiore–one of the seven pilgrimage churches and also one of the four patriarchal basilicas of Rome–was built on the spot where snow, according to Pope Liberius’s vision of the Virgin Mary, would lie in August.

It led me to contemplate on the diverse messages snow seems to embody: innocence, silence, pain, playfulness, longing, solitude, miracle, fantasy, redemption. Liu Zongyuan’s snowy riverscape; the footprints in Cen Sen; the sound of snow in Bai Juyi; the snow in Joyce’s Dublin; in Zhang Dai’s West Lake; in Issa’s haiku; the nostalgic time for parting in Japan; my personal memory of listening to snowfall in Fresh Pond, Cambridge; snow in fairytales; and the miraculous snowfall in June in Chuzhou, China, covering the body of the unjustly executed Dou-E. In Chinese, “xue” (snow) is homonymous to the word for blood.

Messages of White was commissioned by the PRISM Quartet with support from the MAP Fund and the National Endowment for the Arts. The program receives an encore performance on February 4 at the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia.

Additionally, Liang's Verge for string orchestra received its West Coast premiere on February 1 at University of California San Diego. Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and premiered in 2009, Verge was performed by UCSD's Palimpsest ensemble, conducted by Steven Schick.

For more information on the premiere of Messages of White, visit www.prismquartet.com

More on the music of Lei Liang can be found at www.schott-music.com and www.lei-liang.com.

Lei Liang
Messages of White (2011)
for saxophone quartet, erhu, sheng, yangpin, pipa and percussion
17’

Verge (2009)
for 18 solo strings
ca.12’

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