Takashi Yoshimatsu - Digital Bird Suite
II. A Bird in the Twilight
IV. A Bird in the Noon
V. Bird Circuit

Aqueeressence
Yoshi Weinberg, flute
Daniel Schreiner, piano

Takashi Yoshimatsu - Digital Bird Suite (mvts. 2, 4, 5)

Aqueeressence
Yoshi Weinberg, flute
Daniel Schreiner, piano

Yuko Uebayashi's Sonata for flute and piano is made up of four movements with a typical performance lasting around 26 minutes.

'Uebayashi has a distinct compositional style that combines two unexpected styles: French impressionist music and Japanese film music. In particular, Uebayashi is inspired by landscapes, light, and paintings, and she only writes music for musicians to whom she feels a connection. This sonata was commissioned by Jean Ferrandis (flute) and Emile Naoumoff (piano), French musicians of the highest caliber. She admired Ferrandis's playing for its 'very soft, fine pianissimo, akin to glasswork; a passionately eloquent and fiery forte, the instruments singing with gentle, tender-hearted elegance.

The Sonate consists of four movements: starting with a tender and sentimental slow introduction, the first movement, Allegro Moderato, alternates between two themes; the Presto, second movement, is reminiscent of a scherzo, featuring the contrast of playful staccato and virtuosic legato; the third movement, which evokes the feelings of a song, is graceful and calm; and the vibrant fourth movement is an energetic rondo.'

- Paraphrased from The Flute Music of Yuko Uebayashi by Pei-San Chiu; Stephanie Hoeckley; 2018"

Yuko Uebayashi - Flute Sonata (Live Performance)

Aqueeressence
Yoshi Weinberg, flute
Daniel Schreiner, piano

Live performance at The Graduate Center (CUNY) Elebash Hall. 

Olivier Messiaen's "Le Merle Noir" for flute and piano was written in 1952 as a test piece for the Conservatoire de Paris. This was Messiaen's first piece to imitate the song of a single bird species, the Blackbird.

Messiaen - Le Merle Noir

Brian Simalchik’s music is nuanced and captivating, always demonstrating a highly sensitive treatment of the continuum between sound and silence. We have felt a close connection to Brian’s artistry ever since working together on his Seven Songs at nief-norf Summer Music Festival in 2016. As such, we are beyond thrilled to present the world premiere of Brian Simalchik’s Finite Things, written in 2021 for our duo. Elusive, ruminative, and dream-like, this four-movement work resists easy categorization and unilateral meaning. Simalchik speaks eloquently about the piece’s conception and possible interpretations thusly:

"The title for the piece comes from a line in the last stanza of Theodore Roethke’s poem ‘The Far Field,’ a meditation on death and the ends of things. This poem was on my mind a lot during the Fall of 2020, when the many losses and absences of the pandemic hung all around us. The line reads: ‘All finite things reveal infinitude.’ Much of this piece is made up of dream-like progressions of sparse, irregular melodic fragments, suspended in both time and the decaying resonance of the piano. These little fragments reminded me of the dead and decaying things that fill the fields of Roethke’s poem, as well as the abandoned fields on an old farm near my childhood home that I used to explore. You could think of them as being like pieces of rusted machinery, or a decaying fence - overgrown with weeds, fallen down or rusted out, but with the original form still visible beneath the overgrowth, the rust, or despite the pieces being broken apart. 

One other possible argument the piece makes, to me, is how beautiful it is to put so much care into a temporary thing, or into a series of moments which are gone as soon as they arrive. That's really all we can do with our lives—chase beauty, truth, goodness, etc.—without understanding what that might mean in any larger sense. We do it in spite of knowing that we will pass; you might say we do it because we know, deep down, that we will pass, and we want to do everything we can to make meaning during this one, all-too-brief time that we know is ours.”

Brian Simalchik - Finite Things (world premiere)

NYC-based collaborators Daniel Schreiner (he/him) and Yoshi Weinberg (they/them) have been queering the new music scene together since 2016. They met in Knoxville, TN at the nief-norf Music Festival, where their love of contemporary music, the avant garde, and super gay sh*t brought them together as the Aqueeressence.  Since then, they have performed together throughout NYC and France, giving recitals of thoughtfully curated concerts, world premieres, and other flamboyant extravaganza. 

www.yoshiweinberg.com 
www.danielschreinermusic.com

Aqueeressence

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