Live Stream
Mandhira de Saram violin
Matt Calvert electronics
Calliope Tsoupaki (Greece/Netherlands, 1963)
Thin Air (2020)
With physical performances of music largely off the table, and a sense of place traded in for the overfamiliar environments of our everyday, Thin Air has imagined new ways to link us together. Conceived as a composition of ‘solidarity’, Calliope Tsoupaki was asked to write the solo piece Thin Air by Festivals for Compassion, a consortium of organisations working together to keep music flowing through the world. The piece has become a message in a bottle, performed by different artists across the globe, and making for the road at a time when we can’t.
Thin Air’s journey started in June, with guitarist Wiek Hijmans interpreting the piece at an alternative version of Holland Festival. It has since been taken through the virtual versions of events in the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy, and is making due course for performances ‘around the world’. Each performance has become its own spectacle; the notes of Thin Air have been passed on, but the settings, the inflections, and the timbres have changed. Each performer, with their own instrument, discovers what it’s like to play a concert from their newly remote corner of the world.
At hcmf// 2020, Mandhira de Saram will continue the timeline, performing Thin Air in its latest iteration as a violin piece. A renowned interpreter, Saram is also a founding member of the Ligeti Quartet, a group who have subtly expanded the scope of contemporary music, extending it across cultures and genres. Her performance is another link in the Thin Air daisy chain, unique but tied together with the pieces that have been before and those that will come after.