| Performer Bios |
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| Last updated: Wednesday, July 14, 2004 |
Sunday, July 11, 8 PM, $7, All Ages
KEITH EISENBREY & GAVIN BORCHERT (Seattle)
in a concert of piano music
KEITH EISENBREY, GAVIN BORCHERT
An evening of piano music by two fascinating Seattle composer-performers. Eisenbrey's serious whimsy has delighted and confounded Seattle audiences for many years. Borchert is a tireless champion of contemporary composition - cellist, music writer, and composer of works for soloists, chamber ensembles, symphony orchestras, and more.
Tentative program:
(Pieces played by the composer except where noted)
Prelude (GB)
Sonata in 2 Movements (KE)
Five Pieces (GB)
for Ignacio at 40
for Paul at 40
for Gerhard at 80
for Jerry at 50
for Koby at 1
Untitled (KE, played by GB)
Work Architecture (KE)
INTERMISSION
Duet (GB/KE)
Mrs. Ramsay (KE)
Strophe for Jonathan Kramer (GB)
Untitled (Slow Waltz) (GB, played by KE)
Create Desolation (KE)
Keith Eisenbrey
Keith Eisenbrey is a native of the Puget Sound area. He studied composition with Dell Wade, Ken Benshoof, John Rahn, and Benjamin Boretz, and piano with Victor Smiley, Joan Purswell, and Neal O'Doan. He is a charter member of The Barrytown Orchestra, an interactive music-making ensemble based in Barrytown, New York, and is a cofounder of Banned Rehearsal, an ongoing argument in creative musical expression, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. His critical and theoretical work has appeared in Perspectives of New Music and News of Music, and he assisted in the editing of Boretz's Meta Variations: Studies in the Foundations of Musical Thought for its recent re-publication. His compositions have been performed in such far-off places as: Tambov, Russia; Oak Harbor; Olympia; and Capitol Hill. His oeuvre includes solo pieces for various keyboards, songs, a cantata, and chamber works. He lives in the Maple Leaf neighborhood of Seattle with his wife Karen and their two boys, John and Isaac.
"Inspired by a mysterious and majestical whimsy, the music of Keith Eisenbrey explores the vast arcane recesses of human imagination. Cerebral and sensuous, remorselessly speculative, his music seeks to illuminate those most intimate of our personal spaces: the silences across which, in which, and out from which music, thought, and utterance unfold."
Gavin Borchert
Born and raised in Grand Forks, ND, Gavin Borchert studied composition at Michigan State University and at the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati with Darrell Handel and Allen Sapp. A not-entirely-unexpected failure to secure an academic post upon graduation (DMA, 1993) led him to Seattle, where he composes, plays cello in the OK Quartet (dubbed Auquet for upscale gigs), presents CD reviews every other Tuesday on KUOW's "The Beat," and covers classical music for the Seattle Weekly.
Works of his that have received particularly lovely performances include the overture She Stoops to Conquer (Indianapolis Symphony), Canon for an August afternoon (CCM Philharmonia), Five Memos (after Calvino) (Cincinnati Symphony, Tacoma Symphony), Gjallarhorn (Seattle Youth Symphony), Shepherd's Life, with variations (guitarist Mark Wilson), Sweet wines and wines that foam (Philharmonia Northwest), Aubade-canons (The Esoterics), a Piano Quartet (Seattle New Music Ensemble), and Kermesse (Northwest Symphony). For the last three years, he has been at work on a concerto for former Metropolitan Opera clarinetist Sean Osborn.
"Gavin Borchert has written a great deal of piano music. Some of his compositional preoccupations include the reconciliation of non-key-centered (including twelve-tone) harmonic organization with triadic or other consonant sounds; the exploration of canonic structures and the layering of musical material into complex textures; a fascination with traditional Norwegian folk music; and a desire to come up with cheap birthday gifts."
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