Claude Vivier concert to be available as webcast

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(February 2008)

The music of Claude Vivier is to reach a new audience, thanks to a pioneering online concert.

The mystical and passionate music of Claude Vivier (1948-83) has attracted a small yet dedicated cult following in new music circles since his death 25 years ago, but access to his soundworld is to be widened thanks to a pioneering web initiative.

Contemporary music ensemble Psappha combines forces with the BBC Singers and conductor Nicholas Kok for an all-Vivier concert at Lancaster University on 28 February. The Lancaster concert will be filmed and recorded, enabling it to be webcast as a streamed video from 17 March at Psappha's website www.psappha.com and at the Lancaster International Concert Series website www.lancasterconcerts.co.uk.

The concert is one of three by Psappha at Lancaster University during February and March, and all three will be webcast, making it the first new music series in the UK to be made available on a permanent basis online. The Vivier concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3's Hear and Now programme on 15 March.

Claude Vivier was one of the great searchers of his time. Born in Quebec in 1948, he discovered his creative genius as he discovered his gay sexuality, and much of his music has the ardour and the sensuousness of a love song. But music for him was also a spiritual quest, a journey that led him around the world – to Germany, where he studied with Stockhausen; to Iran, where he found the inspiration for his lustrous piano piece Shiraz; to Bali, with whose exuberant culture he felt in tune – and that also led him deeply into himself.

Eventually he found what he was looking for, a style of startling freshness and immense beauty, based on unheard-of melodies moving through extraordinary landscapes of colour and texture. Frustrated by the provincial atmosphere in Montréal, he moved to Paris in his early 30s, and there threw himself into a life of sexual danger from out of which his music would develop. His death, at the hands of a young lover, he eerily foretold in the work on which he was working at the time, Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele?

In a recent article on the Vivier concert in The Guardian, conductor Nicholas Kok said: "It's hard to say why he has been so neglected. Is it because he was Canadian? Is it because he wrote sensual, intensely personal music which doesn't conveniently fit into any modernistic school? Is it because he was gay? It's unfortunate that the one thing people do know about Vivier is that he died a violent death, which gives his legacy an aura of sickly glamour. But it's time to reappraise his work as music, not just the soundtrack to a lurid, psycho-sexual biography."

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