THE MUSIC OF STEVE LACY, Nicholas Isherwood, bass baritone; Daan Vandewalle, piano

THE MUSIC OF STEVE LACY

Nicholas Isherwood, bass baritone
Daan Vandewalle, piano

(Photo Isherwood: Joanna Bergin)

Steve Lacy:

Art
Bone
Prayer
The Needle Boats at San Sabba
Nowhere Street
Somebody Special
The Blue Baboon

Steve’s favorite pianist was Frederic Rzewski, the teacher and mentor of Daan Vandewalle. Like Rzewski, Daan is an accomplished pianist both of the old masters and contemporary music and a great improviser. Nicholas worked closely with Lacy from the late 80s until his premature death, appearing in formations ranging from saxophone/voice duo to double sextet with two singers (Steve’s partner, Irene Aebi). Since his passing, Lacy’s music has largely been forgotten, as people sometimes do not remember that he was not only a fine saxophone player and improviser, but also a great composer, whose understanding of poetry led him to befriend Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Brian Gysin and many other famous writers. The music comes from the texts and the voice and the piano are the instruments that bring it all to life.

The pianist Daan Vandewalle is an internationally acclaimed performer of 20th and 21st century piano music. His repertoire consists of hundreds of pieces, including complete performances of the piano works of Charles Ives, Olivier Messiaen, as well as numerous premieres that resulted from intense collaborations with composers of today. He has performed in a wide range of venues, from small clubs in the underground experimental music scene to established venues such as the Prague Spring festival, the Lincoln Centre in New York or Theatre des Chatelets in Paris. Special projects include his life-long collaboration with the American composer Alvin Curran which resulted in a series of 6hour marathon performances of the piano cycle Inner Cities, a series that was released on a Long Distance classics/Harmonia Mundi cd box.(2005) His latest record is dedicated to Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will never Be Defeated. He premiered dozens of new pieces f.e. Christian Wolff, Clarence Barlowe, Maria De Alvear, Fred Frith and Gordon Mumma. Recent projects include the playing of the Ligeti piano concerto at Carnegie hall New York. In 2015 he played the world premiere of A Dog’s Life, Rzewski’s 2nd piano concerto conducted by Peter Rundel. In 2017 he played the world premiere of Rzewski’s ‘’Songs of Insurrection’’ at the Concertgebouw Bruges.


Bass Nicholas Isherwood has an extensive repertory, ranging from medieval music to contemporary music. He has worked with conductors Joel Cohen, William Christie, Peter Eötvös, Paul McCreesh, Nicholas McGegan, Kent Nagano, Zubin Mehta, Helmuth Rilling and Gennadi Rozhdestvensky as well as composers Sylvano Bussotti, Elliott Carter, George Crumb, Hans Werner Henze, Mauricio Kagel, György Kurtág, Olivier Messiaen, Giacinto Scelsi, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis in prestigious venues around the world (La Scala, Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, La Fenice, Covent Garden, the Théatre des Champs Elysées, the Salzburg Festival, Concertgebouw, all 3 Berlin opera houses, the Vienna Konzerthaus, Tanglewood). He has improvised with Steve Lacy, Joelle Léandre, Sainkho Namtchilak and David Moss, recorded 70 cd’s and appeared in three films. Isherwood is the artistic director and bass for Voxnova Italia. He has been professor of singing at universities such as SUNY Buffalo, Calarts, the Ecole Normale de Musique and the CNSMD in Lyon and given master classes and lectures at the Paris Conservatoire, Musikhochschule Köln, Salzburg Mozarteum, the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi in Milano, IRCAM, USC, UC San Diego, Harvard, Penn, Stanford and the Freie Universität Berlin, as well as in Mexico, New Zealand and Taiwan. He has published peer reviewed articles in the Journal of Singing, LIM and Vox Humana. His book The Techniques of Singing was published by Bärenreiter Verlag in 2013. He is currently professor of singing at the Conservatory of Montbéliard.