Ottawa Citizen: Austrian pianist Anna Magdalena Kokits, on transmitting the “indescribable” through music
Q: Why did you choose to play a piece by Vivian Fung? Do you have a sense of what contemporary Canadian music sounds like?
A: I spent a lot of time researching Canadian contemporary piano music before I found Vivian Fung’s piece Glimpses. It really was “love at first sound.” I knew immediately that I had found the piece I wanted to add to my program as a Canadian contribution. Vivian Fung manages to extract sounds and colours from the piano that I have never heard before. I am extremely excited about her music. She has an absolutely unique voice.
Q: Is it important to you to promote the work of young women composers like Vivian Fung and Manuela Kerer?
A: It is important for me to promote the works of young composers in general. I do think that women are sadly still heavily under-represented in the world of composing as well as conducting. So yes, it is also important to me to bring female composers’ music to life and I’m grateful for having the opportunity and the freedom to do so. What matters in the end, though, is always just the music, what it transmits, what it lets us experience, what colourful, adventurous, magical worlds it opens.