Planetary Candidate Michi Wiancko

PLANETARY CANDIDATE

MICHI WIANCKO

Announcing Planetary Candidate, an album of bold new compositions for solo violin commissioned by Michi Wiancko, “an alluring soloist with heightened expressive and violinistic gifts” (Gramophone Magazine) whose own compositions have been described as “silvery and evocative” (The New Yorker). This project documents her journey as a violinist allowing her to “manifest and passionately inhabit a multitude of musical worlds.” Through this set of spectacular new works for violin, Wiancko celebrates her nearly four-decade relationship to an instrument that, when she plays it, “feels like an act of breathing.”

The premise was simple. Wiancko asked a handful of her favorite composers to write music for acoustic or electro-acoustic 4- or 5-string violin with the goal of creating “a world in which electronic and new classical music cozy up to each other without inhibition.” The result is an album of “bold, virtuosic, emotive, and deeply personal” pieces that add to the canon of solo violin repertoire.

Wiancko’s own composition and title track “Planetary Candidate” is an experimentation that utilizes a few unorthodox sounds made with everyday objects such as a wooden kitchen spoon, a library card, and seashells. She ends the piece with her own voice, borrowing words from the great Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh: “Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in. Breathing out, I know that I am breathing out.”

One of Wiancko’s points of inspiration comes from studying data from the now-decommissioned Kepler Space Telescope. The term “planetary candidate” refers to any thousands of celestial bodies that have been discovered to have planet-like attributes, and are awaiting confirmation.

Looking beyond the album’s title track, Christopher Adler’s “Jolie Sphinx,” is a devilishly difficult piece that explores emotion and robotics that was inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s film, Alphaville.

Paula Matthusen’s “Lullaby for Dead Horse Bay” weaves slow and lush violin melodies around sounds she recorded at the historic New York site of refuse, while her largely improvisatory “Songs of Fuel and Insomnia” is nestled inside a fascinating electronic world created by chaotic noise generators with added feedback and sampling.

In “Skyline,” we hear an emotionally arresting “musical line being written in the air” by Mark Dancigers, followed by “Rhapsody No. 2,” a virtuosic tribute to the long tradition of solo works for violin, composed by fellow violinist-composer Jessie Montgomery. William Brittelle’s electro-acoustic piece “So Long Art Decade” takes inspiration from a track on David Bowie’s 1977 album, Low. “Disintegration (for Michi),” which closes the album, is a personal tribute to Wiancko’s angsty and musically formative years, when she had to perpetually choose between practicing scales or listening to her favorite band, The Cure.

Tracklist