Oni Buchanan's Portraits, Pictures & Prints for Piano CD presents a stylistically wide range of solo piano works inspired by the visual arts. The CD features a set of four Couperin keyboard pieces (caricatures), Ginastera's Argentinean Dances (portraits in dance), the Debussy Estampes (prints), and the famous Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky. Musical versions of such diverse visual art genres as landscapes, caricatures, portraits, sketches, and woodblock prints, composed by such varied composers as Couperin, Ginastera, Debussy, and Mussorsky, make this disc a rare compilation. The music will transport its listeners on a voyage through time and place, introducing them to such characters as the seductive dancers of a Spanish soirée, a lonely Argentinean maiden, and a ballet troupe of unhatched chicks, while showing them vistas as exotic and sonically distinct as a valley of Japanese pagodas, the Parisian catacombs, and the Argentinean pampas.
Oni Buchanan is a concert pianist and poet based in Boston. She has released three CDs on the independent label Velvet Ear Records, and has several new CD projects underway. Oni actively performs solo concerts throughout the U.S. and abroad, with recent concerts at such venues as the Instituto Brasileiro de Administração Municipal (IBAM) in Rio de Janeiro, BRAZIL, the University of Guelph as well as Conrad Grebel University College in Ontario, CANADA, the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts in Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Harvard University Hall Concert Series, among many others. As a poet, Oni has published two books and a chapbook. Oni’s second poetry manuscript, Spring, was recently selected as a winner of the 2007 National Poetry Series Open Competition, and will be published by the University of Illinois Press in August 2008. Her first book of poems, What Animal, won the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series competition, and was published in October 2003. You can learn more about Oni at her website http://www.onibuchanan.com .
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