Posted 28th August 2009

Luís Tinoco Performances

O Silencio e as Pedras

Luís Tinoco has several upcoming performances, beginning with O Silencio e as Pedras. This composition was first performed by the Sond'Ar-te Electric Ensemble, who commissioned the work, at the Cascais Cultural Centre in 2008. It is scored for alto flute, clarinet, piano, violin, cello and granite stones, with live electronics. The upcoming performance will take place on 13 September 2009, at the CCB/Musica Viva Festival, in Lisbon, and will be conducted by Jean-Sábastien Béreau. A subsequent performance will occur in Bilbao at the Guggenheim Museum on 18 November.

Spam!

On 29 October, Tinoco's new work Spam! will be performed at the Culturgest in Lisbon. This piece is scored for baritone and ensemble, and the OrchestrUtopica will be conducted by René Bosc with Mário Redondo as baritone soloist. This humorous work takes its texts from various sources, including internet spam!

O curso das águas

Tinoco's O curso das águas (2001) will be performed by Remix Ensemble at this year's Huddersfield Festival on 29 November.

"Reviewing the Galliard Ensemble's debut disc on Meridian in May 2001, I was struck by the imaginative sonorities of Autumn Wind by Luís Tinoco (b. 1969). That piece also finds a place on this disc devoted entirely to Portuguese music, together with two more, equally inventive, quintets by the same composer, a Ligeti-like suite called Light – Distance and O curso das águas, a pair of studies in movement and stasis." Anthony Burton, BBC Music Magazine

Invention on Landscape

Remix Ensemble will follow its Huddersfield performance with Invention on Landscape, conducted by Ian Volkov, at the Casa da Música in Porto on 22 December. The conductor of the Remix Ensemble, Sarah Ioannides (quoted by Teresa Cascudo (in O Público, Portugal)), commented on the "solid writing and its sound quality", approaching minimalism: "It was conceived as a continuous moment in which special emphasis is given to the variety of timbre and harmonic colours, achieving a strong visual effect".

Cascudo suggests that "We can start to refer to real individualised aesthetic projects. Invention on Landscape, by Luís Tinoco, is a good example of this. Conceived mainly in a visual way, giving special emphasis to the feeling of motion, it uses elements used in some of his recent works, improving them. [...] In brief: The accredited Remix Ensemble, under the excellent direction of Sarah Ioannides, offered real contemporary music, in a concert where the works by Luís Tinoco, Joäo Madureira and Nuno Côrte-Real stand out: three names to retain without reservation."

Paint Me

In 2010 Tinoco's opera Paint Me will be given its premiere. Tinoco has been working with renown librettist Stephen Plaice on this chamber work. It is a co-production between the Portuguese National Opera Theare Säo Carlos and the Culturgest. The premise for the opera is as follows:

"Every day as we move about the world we see the faces of strangers for whom we invent imaginary lives. We create hundreds of these projections, sometimes fleetingly, sometimes more extensively — when, for example, we are sitting opposite them on a train, and spend perhaps an hour in their company, without ever speaking to them, let alone knowing their true stories.
In PAINT ME, a woman boards a train carrying a canvas wrapped up in brown paper. A fellow passenger imagines not only what might be in the package, but also how the woman's
life involves the painting. But the woman too simultaneously imagines the life of the man sitting opposite her. Finally, a third, older woman boards the train and adds her perspective to the situation. The three stories the characters invent all involve the undisclosed canvas.

"It is night. The three passengers are able to watch the reflections of their fellow-travellers on the window of the train. These reflections become independent beings who act out the scenarios that each of our three passengers invent for them. Each of these scenarios has a different style and a different music, reflecting the character inventing them.

"The first story, created in the man's imagination, begins at an auction where the woman is bidding for the painting, a depiction of herself and her previous lover, which she is anxious
to reclaim and destroy...

"The second story, created in the woman's imagination, begins with the visit of the curator to a woman artist's studio to judge whether her work is worthy of hanging in the annual Academy Exhibition...

"The third story, created in the older woman's imagination, is set during a life-drawing class, in which she imagines the man and the woman as artist and model...

Taking as its central theme the projection of the erotic into the everyday, the opera explores the ways in which we conscript other people anonymously to discover possibility and creativity within ourselves."

You can hear more of Tinoco's music on Spotify.

http://www.tinocoluis.com/