CANVAS

Canvas explored the idea of “Art Imitates Art” through a program built around the exchange between visual art and music. Rather than treating the two as separate disciplines, the concert traced the ways artistic ideas can move between mediums: colour becoming sound, visual imagery becoming musical narrative, and existing music being transformed into something new through another artistic response.

The program approached this idea from several directions. Väinö Raitio’s Four Colour Poems for Piano explored colour directly through music, translating visual ideas into harmony, texture and sound. Liszt’s Hunnenschlacht, inspired by Wilhelm von Kaulbach’s monumental painting, took a visual scene and transformed it into a dramatic symphonic work. Josh Spirek’s Reimagined Pictures at an Exhibition continued this process of artistic reinterpretation, taking existing musical material and reshaping it into a new orchestral work. Debussy’s Cello Sonata, presented in orchestral arrangement, further explored the idea of musical colour through changes in timbre and orchestral texture.

New visual artworks were commissioned specifically to accompany the program, adding another layer to this exchange between mediums. The resulting concert became a conversation between existing artworks, musical responses to those artworks, new musical interpretations and newly created visual art. Canvas therefore explored not simply how music can imitate art, but how one artistic work can inspire another, which can then inspire something else, with each interpretation creating a new way of seeing and hearing the original idea.

Josh Spirek - Reimagined Pictures at an Exhibition (World Premiere)
Claude Debussy, arr. Spirek - Sonate pour Violoncelle et Piano (Arr. Orchestra)
Väinö Raitio, arr. Spirek - Four Colour Poems for Piano (Arr. Orchestra)
Franz Liszt - Symphonic Poem No. 11 “Hunnenschlacht”

Josh Spirek - Conductor
Tiffany Lee - Solo Cello