Department of Music

Xenia Pestova performs Hans Otte at Café Oto

On 27 January 2016 our Director of Performance Xenia Pestova will perform Hans Otte’s monumental work for solo piano, ‘The Book of Sounds’ at the leading London venue Café Oto.

Seductive, beguiling, scintillating and transformative: the rarely-performed ‘Book of Sounds’ by the neglected experimental German composer and pianist Hans Otte takes the listener on an immersive and meditative journey. Lasting over an hour, this major work is in 12 continuous movements, demanding great stamina and concentration from the performer. Ranging from sparse and abstract sections to virtuosic passagework and at times reminiscent of Satie, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, early John Cage, Keith Jarrett and even Scriabin, this unusual masterpiece defies classification and makes for a unique experience.

The composer has written: “This ‘Book of Sounds’ rediscovers the listener as a partner of sound and silence, who in the best for his world, wishes for once to be totally at one with sound. The ‘Book of Sounds’ rediscovers the piano as an instrument of timbre and tuneful sound with all its possibilities of dynamics, colour and resonance. This ‘Book of Sounds’ rediscovers playing as the possibility of experiencing oneself in sound, of becoming at one in time and space with all the sounds around one. This ‘Book of Sounds’ rediscovers a world of consonant experience which could only now be written because of a totally changed consciousness of sounds on earth.”

You can find out more information and book tickets for the performance through the Café Oto website.

Posted on Wednesday 16th December 2015

Department of Music

The University of Nottingham
Lakeside Arts Centre
University Park
Nottingham, NG7 2RD

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