New Consonant Music

Lianes (2006) is a suite of three piano pieces dedicated to Éliane Reyes, a great specialist in the music of Michel Lysight.

The first opens in the high register of the piano on a few measures sounding like a dreamy improvisation, almost “out of time”. The character changes abruptly with the regular flow of sixteenth notes to which an expressive theme is superimposed. These two elements gradually evolve into a more lively and agitated central section that leads to the return of the expressive theme treated in a three-voice canon. An enigmatic conclusion is made on the “out of time” improvisation, played this time in the lower register.

Very calm and meditative, the second piece loops a theme in C mode treated in a four-part canon (in the major third, in the right fifth and in the seventh major). The piano’s resonance pedal is held continuously so as to create a harmonic halo until a brutal modulation in the lower major third (A-flat mode) followed by other mode changes that will see the return of the C mode for the conclusion.

The third piece, with its obsessive and whimsical character, is technically much more virtuosic than the first two. It requires a very great rhythmic precision on the part of the performer as well as a great sense of harmonic colours in order to bring out the structure resulting from sudden changes of modes or tones.