Violinist Tim Fain and Guitarist Giovanni Piacentini
New Recording Featuring Two World Premieres
Blind Bay Records
Release Date: February 3, 2021
Violinist/composer Tim Fain and composer/guitarist Giovanni Piacentini team up to present a new album, Adrift in the Garden of Beautiful Things, released on Blind Bay Records. The recording includes two world premieres: Piacentini’s Sonata, Adrift in the Garden of Beautiful Things, and a new arrangement of Fain’s work for violin and orchestra, Resonance, along with Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise. These two artists, and friends, celebrate the age-old tradition of the composer/performer, following in the great pianist and composer Rachmaninov’s footsteps, on the album. They worked remotely to record and produce the music in late 2020 while sheltering in place in Western Montana and Los Angeles respectively.
Available on Amazon and Apple Music.
COMPOSER NOTES:
Adrift in the Garden of Beautiful Things
I. Prelude
II. Habanera
III. Cantilena
The title of the piece, Adrift in the Garden of Beautiful Things, refers in a metaphorical way, to a kind of hallucination where we wander through this magical space with an epicurean abandon simply rejoicing in pleasure and instant euphoria, free and without any kind of remorse or sense of guilt. It is as if we were granted the permission that we all seek to simply be completely happy and to satisfy absolutely all our desires. This anarchic and narcissistic metaphor frees us from all responsibility and morality and allows us to live in a constant state of lightness, superficiality and decadent abandonment. Each movement transports us to a different moment within this stupor until finally, the absence of negative emotions lead us to shift our attention from receiving to giving and the initial epicurean pursuit evolves into al altruistic and generous one. The game between the violin and the guitar is a kind of dialogue that narrates this fantastic journey full of abandonment, questioning, reverence and submission in the face of such beauty. This work is dedicated to Tim Fain.
– Giovanni Piacentini
Resonance
I began writing Resonance as an exercise in dynamic evolution of a melody.
A loose set of variations, Resonance begins unassumingly with the theme performed in an almost offhand manner as pizzicato on solo violin, shadowed by a gentle accompaniment of pitched percussion instruments. In a short time, the piece grows and quickens, to almost outsize proportions, reaching a triumphant, orchestral climax before returning to an intimate character, sealed by a partial restatement of the first phrase.
The little melody that could.
The work was central to a collaboration with director Jessica Brillhart, then principal filmmaker at Google VR, and was commissioned in part by Google. We aimed to create a virtual reality film based around my composition, in which I perform throughout.
The film, which we also titled Resonance, was the first VR experience to literally transport viewers inside a symphony orchestra in 360VR, taking them on a journey of inception, creation, and culmination via a series of evocative locations. While the film’s frequent cuts represented an artistic challenge, it became clear that a continuous and cohesive musical score can serve as a common thread to maintain immersion in a VR experience, and greatly help in easing the transition between scenes.
This new version was created by Giovanni Piacentini and Tim Fain for guitar and violin. The score is dedicated to my friend Nick Kadner, Executive Producer at Greencard films who passed away tragically in the months following our work on the film.
– Tim Fain