Recording: Lori Freedman

Artist: Lori Freedman

Song: Décombres [edited excerpt] [composer: Raphaël Cendo]

Recorded at The Music Gallery ("X Avant X"), October 15, 2015.

Lori Freedman - Décombres [edited excerpt]

This year's X Avant not only celebrated the festival's tenth anniversary, but also the Music Gallery's 40th season. No surprise, then, that the festival incorporated various methods to look back at the MG's legacy. The festival's first night concluded with a visit from Montréal-based clarinet wizard Freedman, who was bringing a new performance entitled The Virtuosity of Excess, "a 55-minute 'spectacle' of solo compositions for contrabass clarinet and bass clarinet". Embracing the sometimes ungainly physicality of her instruments, the performance felt at times as much like a dance, with one piece finding Freedman slowly gliding along a long row of her score, spread out across a half-dozen music stands. "Excess" was celebrated in several ways, from shout-singing to stretches of silence to the glitched-out signal-processing heard here, sending shards of noise and static across the quadraphonic spectrum.