Permutations041814: Taka Kigawa and Alejandro Acierto

Extraordinary pianist Taka Kigawa joins Permutations West from NYC on April 18 for a singular performance of Tristan Murail’s Territoires de l’oubli at UC Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies. Chicago-based maverick musician Alejandro T. Acierto will perform new pieces for voice, contrabass clarinet, and electronics from his forthcoming album, amid these traces—an event not to be missed.

Written in 1977 for the French composer-pianist Michaël Lévinas, who gave the first performance in Rome in 1978, Tristan Murail’s evocative “Territoires de l’oubli” is “a massive exploration of the piano's resonance, unfolding in a huge curve of continuously evolving textures.” Read Murail’s full note and hear an audio sample of Territoires: http://www.tristanmurail.com/en/oeuvre-fiche.php?cotage=TR1482

Taka Kigawa has earned outstanding international recognition as a recitalist, soloist, and chamber music artist since winning the Diploma Prize at the 1998 Concurs Internacional Maria Canals De Barcelona in Spain. He has received such accolades from The New York Times as “Phenomenon. There’s no denying that he’s something special” and from The New Yorker “Kigawa is an artist of stature” and from Argentina’s leading newspaper, La Nacion, “Taka Kigawa is a stupendous virtuoso.” He has performed extensively as a recitalist and soloist in New York, Washington DC, Boston, Cleveland, Paris, Milan and Barcelona, with appearances in Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Severance Hall in Cleveland, Cité de la Musique, and Salle Gaveau in Paris, and Plau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona, and Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. He has collaborated closely with renowned musicians Pierre Boulez, Myung-Whun Chung and Jonathan Nott. Mr. Kigawa graduated from The Juilliard School with a Master of Music.

A continuation of his 2013 EP those prone to dysphasiatic utterances, Alejandro Acierto’s amid these traces navigates the perilous moments of a body in constant states of negotiation, always attempting to instantiate a presence that is ultimately and inevitably flawed. Pushing the limits of language, the body, and presence, these pieces illuminate the physical body as an inherently flawed system prone to error in a sea of instant communication.

Alejandro T. Acierto is an artist and musician working in text, sound, music, and performance whose work focuses on examining different modes of representation beyond the ocular to articulate multiple modalities of fluid and shifting identities. His work in these time-based mediums has led Time-Out New York to call him a “maverick” and Time-Out Chicago a “new-music raconteur.” His recent performance works have been presented at Counterpath in Denver, Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival (BIPAF), the Center for Performance Research, and at the Slingshot Festival for Music, Art, & Technology. He has also exhibited shows in LA, San Francisco, Detroit, and Chicago, and has performed with ensembles worldwide. He is a member of contemporary chamber orchestra Ensemble Dal Niente, and can be heard on Carrier, Albany, Avant Media, and Parlour Tapes + Records. His second solo album of works for voice and contrabass clarinet was recently released on Prom Night Records. He currently lives and works in Chicago where he is completing his MFA in New Media Arts at the University of Illinois.

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