Création Convaincante et Surprenant Dvorak
Le Devoir
By Christophe Huss
March 15, 2018
"Alexina Louie réussit ici une de ces créations que les mélomanes sont en droit d’attendre avec une saine curiosité et soif de découverte et non avec crainte, comme une pilule dure à avaler."
Ideas Of The North: Alexina Louie's Latest Composition is a Real Triple Threat
Artsfile
By Peter Robb
September 26, 2017
"Alexina Louie's Triple Concerto a real firecracker."
Stirring Up Ghosts in Bowels of the Bay
The Winnipeg Free Press
By Holly Harris
February 3, 2017
"ight out of the gate came one of the night’s most compelling works. The world première of Canadian composer Alexina Louie’s Falling Through Time, composed and performed by Winnipeg’s Clearwater Quartet, showed the artful hand of this national treasure."
Review of Susan Chan's 'East West Encounter II'
Audio Video Club of
Atlanta
By Phil
Muse
"The
music of Louie, coming a generation later than Lam, reveals more
of the influence of western music in Memories of an Ancient
Garden. This haunting piece, though written for piano, has the
nature of a symphonic poem. It uses harmonics and glissandi, as
well as tone clusters played with the palm, to create a mood of
strange beauty."
L'Étoile
Duo's star shines through Prokofiev's
darkly-hued sonata
The Calgary Herald
By Stephan Bonfield
June 26, 2015
"Ms. Huber’s softly struck chords next rose in Messiaen-like colours to a final revelation of nature and primordial light, shimmering down to its last fading photon. It was a lovely narrative, and there can be no doubt that the performance was a total success. I have always been partial to Ms. Louie’s music, and can say that this piece, and all her repertoire will endure for a very long time in the years to come."
10 Game-Changing Pieces of
Music
The Toronto Star
By Peter Goddard
March 26, 2015
"We asked prominent players in the Toronto music industry to weigh
in on one favourite piece of music that changed history:
'The Rite of Spring, Igor Stravinsky,
1913: What made this piece so revolutionary? The
hammered power and irregularity of the rhythms and its polytonal
harmony were shocking and yet Stravinsky’s control of these
expanded fields was dazzling. The multi-layers of independent lines
fit together like a mosaic, creating a gigantic wall of sound that
must have sounded so powerful, complex and chaotic at its premiere.
The musical world had not experienced anything like it — primitive,
aggressive. It exploded the concepts of rhythm, harmony, melody,
structure and put them back together in a way that was
inconceivable for the time. Brutal and lyrical force. Music was
forever changed.' —Alexina
Louie, composer"
Read the full article
here ⇢
National Arts
Centre | Biographies | Alexina Louie
"The music of Alexina Louie bears a personal stamp derived from a
unique blend of her Chinese background, an exotic instrumental
palette, both traditional and non-traditional elements of western
music, poetic images, nature, historical studies and a fascination
with heavenly phenomena."
Royal Conservatory's 21C Music Festival Gives Living Composers Their Due
The Toronto Star
By Trish Crawford
May 20, 2014
As Louie explains it, the commissioned work started off 'as a blank
slate.' “This is when imagination comes into play,” she says,
adding she wanted the piece to be colourful and dramatic.
“Imaginary Opera” has four movements, starting with a mysterious
prologue that ends “in a cloud of very dense wind
chimes.”
Read the
full article here ⇢
Harpist Erica
Goodman on 'From the Eastern Gate'
The Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra
May 17, 2014
"Everything
[Alexina did] has meaning and makes interesting sounds and
sonorities,” says Goodman. “She even uses ordinary techniques in
just a beautiful way."
Read the full article
here ⇢
Music in the Hemispheres: An Interview with Alexina Louie
Decoded Arts
By Emily-Jane Hills Orford
May 4, 2014
“The music of Canadian composer Alexina Louie reaches out to grasp the very soul of the listener. Its ethereal quality transcends both time and place and leaves the audience, as well as the performers, with a distinct feeling of being in a trance, a dream. The unique sounds and colours of Alexina Louie’s music enlighten the listener, allowing the music, the performer and the audience to experience an idea, to gain knowledge of an emotion.”
Juno-winner gives vibrant performance: James Ehnes recital
Edmonton Journal
By Mark Morris
April 3, 2014
“Alexina Louie’s new work, Beyond Time…. It is substantial, cast in three movements, all suggesting, in the composer’s words, that “the piece stands outside time, in an infinite sound world.” It was commissioned by Ehnes, and received its premiere last month.... Beyond Time confirms, if one needed any confirmation, that Alexina Louie, with her kind of 21st century impressionism, is one of the finest composers in Canada today.”
NAC
Orchestra kicks off seven-city tour of China
The Toronto Star
by Martin Knelman
October 8, 2013
"HONG KONG—The National Arts Centre
Orchestra’s epic two-week, seven-city tour of China is all about
building bridges between Canada and this country. So it was
entirely appropriate that the first piece the orchestra from Ottawa
played in the opening concert of the tour was written by a
third-generation Chinese Canadian composer.... Alexina
Louie..."
Read the
full article here ⇢
Alexina Louie’s musical journey: The
Chinese-Canadian composer found her voice by returning to her
roots
The Ottawa
Citizen
by Peter Robb
September 21, 2013
"OTTAWA — When The National Arts Centre Orchestra takes to the
stage in Hong Kong next month, the respected Chinese-Canadian
composer Alexina Louie will celebrate a homecoming of
sorts.
Her work, Bringing The Tiger Down From The Mountain, will
help open the NACO’s major seven-city tour of China in October.
That in itself is gratifying, but it also marks a major step on
Louie’s musical journey..."
Classical diplomacy: Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra to tour China
The Globe and Mail
by Robert Harris
April 15, 2013
"The artistic highlights of the visit will include the performance
of two Mozart violin concertos with the orchestra’s world-renowned
music director, Pinchas Zukerman, as soloist, as well as
performances of two contemporary Canadian compositions: ...Alexina
Louie’s Bringing The Tiger Down From the Mountain
II.
Louie is a Chinese-Canadian composer, and her piece features Amanda
Forsyth, the NAC’s principal cellist, as soloist."
Read the
full article here ⇢
Alexina Louie
goes for the throat (singing)
CBC Music Blog
Post
by Scott Tresham
November 02, 2012
"CBC Music decided to
surprise Toronto composer Alexina Louie with an
impromptu lesson in the art of throat singing last weekend, given
by Evie
Mark and Akinisie
Sivuarapik. Mark and Sivuarapik are performing
Louie's Take
the Dog Sled (for two Inuit
throat singers and ensemble) with the National
Arts Centre Orchestra, as part of their current
northern Canada tour...
Louie first visited the North back in 2000, as part of a tour led
by Adrienne Clarkson (who was, at the time, the Governor General of
Canada). Louie was privileged to visit the Northwest Territories,
where she feasted on caribou and Arctic char, marvelled at the
beauty of the Mackenzie River Delta from the window of a small
twin-engine Otter and experienced first-hand the art, music and
culture of the incredible people who live there. 'It would
take time for the experience to resonate with me,' Louie says, but
she remembers having an immediate sense 'that the exposure to the
North had changed [her].'"
Read the full article
here ⇢
Northern magic: NACO prepares to bring the sound of its music to the North
The Canadian Press
by Peter Robb
October 11, 2012
"If you listen carefully you can hear
the sounds of the North: The wind whistling across the tundra; the
hiss and hum of the runners on a dog sled; the howl of a wolf or
the cracking of the sea ice. Capturing those sounds in a piece of
music, now that's not easy. But Alexina Louie has tried to do just
that. Her chamber composition entitled Take the Dog Sled
will be a central part of the National Arts Centre Orchestra's tour
of Northern Canada, which begins Oct. 26."
Read the
full article here ⇢
Echoes of the Quartet for The End of Time: A new work commissioned by the Gryphon Trio takes inspiration from Messiaen’s wartime work
Gramophone; The world's authority on classical music since
1923
by Bill Rankin
May 16, 2012
"On May 9, at the Banff Cantre in the heart of the Canadian
Rockies, the renowned Gryphon Trio and clarinettist James Campbell
performed Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of
Time – with a twist. Preceding the work, which Messiaen
wrote while he was a Prisoner of War and which he premiered with a
group of fellow prisoners on January 15, 1941, was Echoes
of Time – a Gryphon-commissioned work from Toronto-based
composer Alexina Louie. The work will act as a prelude to a new
40-minute play that tells the story of how Messiaen composed his
seminal work. The play has been written by London-based writer
Mieczysława Wazacz, will be directed by her sister Helena
Kaut-Howson and will eventually become part of the Gryphon Trio’s
touring repertoire..."
Read the
full article here ⇢
Review: Christina
Petrowska Quilico (Piano)
Music Web International
by Bob Briggs
"A big hurrah for this disk for it brings to us a major work by Alexina Louie, one of the brightest, and most exciting, composing talents to come out of Canada in recent years."