PERFORMERS
- Josefina Urraca, piano
ABOUT THE CONCERT
“toccata & bruise” (2016) is a duet for piano, pianist and fixed media by Celeste Oram, a composer who grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand and is now based in New York. The piece meditates on the physical idea of touch. As she plays, the pianist listens to Glenn Gould's 1959 Salzburg recording of his own piano transcription of Sweelinck's organ “Fantasia Contraria” in G Dorian; though the audience barely hears it, this recording serves as a hidden audio score to which the performer precisely synchronizes her gestures against fixed video. Oram frames the work as a “transcriptive fantasy”—a fantasia on touch itself, tracing how the organ's mechanical action becomes, through Gould's pianism, an intensely tactile art.