De Mares Imaginados for solo flute (excerpt) by Pedro Alvarez, performed by Mark Takeshi McGregor. Available on the album "Lutalica" on Redshift Records. Download the Lutalica album for free at: redshiftrecords.org/releases/tk468/

Pedro Alvarez is an composer, improviser, and scholar, born in Chile and currently based in Perth, Western Australia (Whadjuk-Nyoongar country). His solo flute work, De Mares Imaginados (2009), consists of short, virtuosic statements interspersed with moments of silence, the exact durations left to the discretion of the performer. In lieu of a program note, Alvarez provides the following quote from the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (translated by Alvarez): My soul is a black maelstrom; vast vertigo around the void; movement of an endless ocean around a hole in nothingness; and in those waters that are more a turn than waters all images float of what I ever saw and heard in the world – there go houses, books, drawers, traces of music and voices’ syllables, in a sinister and bottomless swirl.

Pedro Alvarez: De Mares Imaginados (excerpt)

Described as a “mind-blowing” musician of “huge physical energy” (Times Colonist), flutist Mark Takeshi McGregor is one of Canada’s leading interpreters of classical, contemporary, and experimental music. As a soloist, chamber musician, and interdisciplinary artist, Mark has performed extensively across five continents, including appearances at Vancouver New Music Society, Little Chamber Music Series That Could, Innovations en Concert (Montreal), GroundSwell (Winnipeg), Honolulu Festival, Internationale ADEvantgarde-Festival (Munich), the Melos-Ethos Festival (Bratislava), Núcleo Música Nova’s International Symposium of New Music (Curitiba, Brazil), and the 2017 ISCM World New Music Days (Vancouver). An outspoken advocate of new music, Mark is the principal flute of the Aventa Ensemble in Victoria, flutist of the Vancouver-based Tiresias Duo with pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa, and flutist of the McGregor-Verdejo Duo with guitarist Adrian Verdejo. McGregor has given many local and world premieres, and considers the commissioning of new works by contemporary composers to be a cornerstone of his work as a musician.