Volume 24 Issue 8 - May 2019

PROFILE
ANDRÉ PARMANTIER
Ana
Sokolović
Evta Comes to Town
DAVID JAEGER
I
remember the first time
I heard Ana Sokolović’s
music: I was in Paris,
participating as CBC Radio’s
delegate at the International
Rostrum of Composers
(IRC) in 1996. My Radio-
Canada colleague, Laurent
Ana Sokolović
Major, had chosen to
present a work for violin duo, Ambient V, composed in
1995 by Montreal composer Sokolović (b. 1968) who had
come to Canada from her native Serbia in 1992. I recall
thinking that this was a distinctly fresh musical voice.
There were elements of Serbian folk music, minimalism,
as well as choreographed movement by the two players.
It all added up to a memorable impression of music that
was playful, yet highly focused and purposeful.
I certainly was not the only person to be impressed by Ambient
V. Another young Montreal composer, Jean Lesage (b. 1958), heard
the work and recommended it to a colleague who was designing
a program for the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec
(SMCQ). The piece was programmed on the SMCQ concert, recorded
for broadcast on Radio-Canada, and subsequently chosen as the
Radio-Canada submission to the IRC. Ambient V is available on a
recording on the SNE label called Nouvelle Musique Montréalaise
II through the Canadian Music Centre. Incidentally, Sokolović and
A scene from Svadba
Lesage connected romantically, and were married in 1998.
In 1999, Sokolović was named Grand Prize winner in the CBC/
Radio-Canada National Competition for Young Composers, for which
I served as CBC’s coordinator. The work with which she won is titled,
Géométrie sentimentale. It’s a work in which the thematic material
is seen from three different angles: “music through different geometries,”
as her program note states. It was through her success at the
competition that I first met Sokolović, and since that time we have
collaborated on numerous occasions.
Géométrie sentimentale had been commissioned in 1997 by the
Ensemble contemporaine de Montréal (ECM+), a large chamber
ensemble created in 1988 and led by its founder and artistic director,
the Montreal conductor, Véronique Lacroix. Lacroix had also been
in the audience for that same SMCQ concert in 1995 and had heard
Sokolović’s Ambient V. Like many others, Lacroix, too, was struck
by the distinctive voice she heard in the work. Over time, and at last
count, she has commissioned four works from Sokolović. The most
recent of these commissions is the violin concerto, Evta.
Sokolović told me she based the concerto on ideas that surfaced in
conversations with her soloist, the Montreal-born, but now Torontobased
violin virtuoso, Andréa Tyniec. Two areas of interest that Tyniec
expressed were Gypsy violin music and yoga. Sokolović wrote, “Evta
means ‘seven’ in the Serbian Roma language. Each of the seven movements
of the concerto is inspired by the colours of the chakras and
is associated with one of the notes of the scale: C/red, D/orange, E/
yellow, F/green, G/blue, A/indigo and B/violet.” She further mentions,
“The work is strongly influenced by Gypsy violin music played in
the Balkans.” Tyniec told me: “Working with Ana on Evta after
performing so many of her violin works during the past years, both
solo and chamber, has been a real artistic highlight for me in my
career. Playing Evta is a personal experience since some of its themes
and structures are drawn from conversations Ana and I had years
ago. Evta is also a wonderful challenge for any soloist, to be at once
a prominent voice leading the narrative and still remaining a part of
the bigger textures of the work. There is such joy in being able to both
stand out, be oneself and belong.”
BERNARD COUTANT
14 | May 2019 thewholenote.com