Award-winning Canadian pianist Katherine Dowling brings The Elegy Project to Chamberfest, delivering a solo piano performance of musical meditations on mourning, loss, grief – and life and love. Says Dowling, “my goal as a contemporary musical artist is to cultivate…a desire for deep and meaningful musical experiences that, while not always “pretty,” do always reflect the threads of our common humanity.” For The Elegy Project, Dowling collected and learned over 100 elegies and filtered them down to a beautiful programme that traverses eras and cultures.

Dowling views the artist’s role as one of service to others, requiring sincerity, vulnerability, empathy, curiosity, compassion, and the courage to venture into dark places of the human experience. This led her to The Elegy Project, in which Dowling hopes to create for her audience a sense of interconnectedness through her own musical responses to our shared human experiences. Like so many others, Dowling lost loved ones during the COVID-19 pandemic. “In my grief, I learned and played elegies by composers from eras and cultures different than my own. The time I spent with these diverse works fused my daily life at the piano with my daily processes of grieving.” Join Dowling for an experience she hopes will be an “antidote to the fragmented, superficial, and consumerist messaging that pervades twenty-first century life.”

Programme

Maurice Ravel (1875 – 1937)
Pavane pour une infante défunte

Béla Bartók (1881 – 1945)
Elegy op.8/b, no.1

Frédéric Chopin (1810 – 1849)
Mazurka op. 17, no.4

Ferruccio Busoni (1866 – 1924)
Elegy BV 249 – 7 Berceuse

Arnold Schoenberg (1874 – 1951)
Klavierstücke op.19, no.6

Alice Ping Yee Ho (b. 1960)
Elegy: “There is no night without a dawning”

Valentin Silvestrov (b. 1937)
Elegy

Teresa Carreño (1853 – 1917)
Plaintes au bord d’une tombe, 4eme Elégie, Op.20

Rudolf Escher (1912 – 1980)
Arcana
I. Preludio
II. Toccata
III. Ciaccona
IV. Finale

• Katherine Dowlingpiano