Pianist Lisa Moore completes her 3-EP series (Seven, Lightning Slingers and Dead Ringers) with Stainless Staining, featuring compositions by Irish composer, Donnacha Dennehy.
Commissioned by Lisa Moore with funds provided by the Arts Council of Ireland, the title track, Stainless Staining was written for piano and soundtrack. The soundtrack is made up of samples of a piano (played both normally, and 'inside') retuned to provide a massive harmonic spectrum of 100 overtones based on a fundamental low G#. Explains the composer, "This reflects an increasing recent concern of mine with a kind of pulsating, rhythmic use of the overtone series. That concern can range from a rather extreme concentration in this piece and Bulb ( a piano trio where pulsing glissandos connect nodes in the harmonic series) to a more integrated approach in the large scale vocal and instrumental pieces, where that approach is used often in a looser fashion only in particular areas."
Reservoir is a work for solo piano, written in two parts - the second part reflecting upon the first - was inspired by a Bill Viola video in which a man is gradually submerged in water. Though not intended, Dennehy's piece draws a similarity with the video; an oppositional relationship between the first and second halves of the work and that between being above or under water. The sustaining quality of the second half could feel as if it were underwater, a reservoir of collected resonances, amplified by the use of the sustain pedal.
