GBSR Duo (UK) | Bryn Harrison (UK) | PLAYGROUND

GBSR DUO | Bryn Harrison | Five Transfigurations and Seven Litanies

An event in the PLAYGROUND contemporary music concert series

Tuesday, 13 October, 6 pm
Sapieha Palace, 13 L. Sapiegos Street, Vilnius

On 13 October, the PLAYGROUND concert series welcomes special guests: After a two-year break, one of Britain’s most active contemporary music duos, GBSR Duo, returns to Lithuania. At Sapieha Palace, they will perform Five Transfigurations and Seven Litanies, a new work by British composer Bryn Harrison written specifically for this piano and percussion duo. The piece continues the practice of attentive listening developed throughout the PLAYGROUND concert series, inviting audiences to experience music as a long, gradually unfolding process.

Five Transfigurations and Seven Litanies is a new work by Bryn Harrison for piano and percussion, written for GBSR Duo. Much of Harrison's music written over the past twenty years or so has been concerned with the passing of time; how we reflect on the coming and going of events over often long durational spans. This new, 100-minute work might, similarly, be seen as a mediation on time passing. It takes as its starting point a quote from the late American composer and theorist Jonathan Kramer, who said that the present is not simply the place where perception happens but ‘also the meeting ground for memory and anticipation, both of which colour our perception’.

The music draws on a world of vanishings, remembrances, apprehensions and recollection, through which memory is presented not as a site for nostalgia but as a vehicle for issuing forth what is to become. Densely contrapuntal transfigurations, enriched by differentiations of resonance and microtonal intonation through electronics and preparation, alternate with simple prayer-like litanies on unison vibraphone and piano.

Throughout the work, the fleeting, ephemeral passages of the transfigurations are gradually stripped away and becalmed, revealing the litanies encoded within the fabric of the music.

GBSR Duo are specialists in the timbral delicacy, rhythmic precision, and long-term structural communication this music requires – developed and demonstrated through major premieres and recordings of long-form works by composers including Eva-Maria Houben, Oliver Leith, Angharad Davies and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Performers:
GBSR Duo
Siwan Rhys – piano
George Barton – percussion

17:00 | Meet the Composer — Bryn Harrison in conversation with Rasa Murauskaitė
18:00 | GBSR Duo

Tickets: €20 / €15 (discounted)

The international PLAYGROUND programme will continue this winter:
— December 1 – Anzû Quartet (USA)

Main Concert Producer: Tarp tylos
Co-production: Sapieha Palace
Curator: Arnas Kmieliauskas
Strategic Partner: Lithuanian Composers’ Union
Media Partners: LRT Klasika, Radio Vilnius
Accommodation Partner: St. Palace Hotel
Sponsor: Baltic-American Freedom Foundation
Funded by: Lithuanian Council for Culture, LATGA, Vilnius City Municipality

Visual Design: Lauryna Narkevičiūtė
Text Editing and Translation: Alexandra Bondarev