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Mirna Lekić

 PIANIST

PUBLICATIONS

M I R A G E  —   Mirna Lekić, piano     (Furious Artisans 6832) 

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"A captivating listen that truly celebrates the versatility of the piano"

"wealth of talent and imagination"

"meticulous and hypnotic playing" - Tom Hauger, TakeEffectReviews

 

ALI-ZADEH. Music for Piano. ALBENIZ. Leyenda. HOVHANESS. Achtamar. SHAMO. Prelude. DRAPER. Fractured Bells. LACHENMANN. Guero. DEBUSSY. Pagodes. GODOWSKY. Gamelan. PROKOFIEV. Prelude. SCHERZINGER. Etude Miniature: The Horse is Not Mine, a Hobby Horse.

M I R A G E is a collection of sonic illusions, allusions, and transformations that celebrate the piano’s unique capability to imitate, echo and morph into other instruments. These compositions reveal and free a broad spectrum of sounds inherent in the instrument, inviting it to take on the roles of a traveler and a polyglot. The album title points to the illusive and elusive aspects of the various transformative processes and their results, as well as to the ongoing conversation between tradition and innovation in the never-ending search for the many possibilities the instrument has to offer.   


 


MASKS  —  Mirna Lekić, piano   (Centaur Records 3519) 

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"One of the year’s most absorbing listens"  Huntley Dent, Fanfare  

"Lithe, energetic, brilliantly thematic album" LaRue, New York Music Daily (full review here)

DEBUSSY. La boîte à joujoux. Masques. MUCZYNSKI. Masks. MARTINÜ. Puppets: Columbine Dances; Harlequin; Fairy Tale. VILLA-LOBOS. Baby’s Family: The Porcelain Doll; The Papier-mâché Doll; The Wooden Doll


 

 

"This is Lekić’s debut commercial album, and it’s a beauty." "The program of works she has put together is so engaging and her playing so spellbinding that this is one of those rare recitals you wish wouldn’t end so soon.""Lekić’s technical command goes without saying, but what I find particularly entrancing in listening to this release is the way in which her musical intuition allows her to strip away the “masks” of each of these pieces and bare the sometimes poignant and painful visages behind them. Very strongly recommended." Jerry Dubins, Fanfare Magazine

"This range from childhood to the shadowy side of lost innocence is conveyed in Lekić’s carefully crafted programming, which yields more and more overtones as you continue to listen. I warmly recommend it as one of the year’s most absorbing listens.""Lekić handles this long score (31 minutes) [La Boîte à joujoux] with adroitness and imagination, delivering the colorful variety of Debussy’s innocent-seeming music.""...the piano technique is dazzling, featuring rapid, repeated figurations and whirligigs that Lekić tosses off with aplomb." Huntley Dent, Fanfare Magazine 

"This program contains playful works that are seldom heard, inspired by dolls and puppets. Lekic plays with much grace and color. One gets the sense that she is especially adept at conveying character." "Lekic offers a very witty reading of life in a toy-box. Her supple tempo manipulations and changes in color communicate its spontaneity and draw attention. It is a droll work, but Lekic captures an undercurrent of unease, especially in the disquieting harmonies of 'Fields of Battle. This is no Toy Story. ""The short 'Masques' another of Debussy's more underrated works, is played beautifully here. Villa Lobos's Baby's Family is also rather unfamiliar, but has a lot of flash and drive. It is meant to portray the personality of each doll, and Lekic does the character changes very well. Though Martinu's Loutky sounds more didactic than the other works, Lekic musters a lot of charm." Kang, American Record Guide


EASTERN CURRENTS - Ensemble 365  (Romeo Records 7320)

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"This is a phenomenally interesting release and, for those who have a natural affinity to the music of the East, required listening." Colin Clarke, Fanfare

FRANGHIZ ALI-ZADEH. Three Watercolors for soprano flute and prepared piano. MING-HSIU YEN. Kuang-Tsao for flute and piano. BUN-CHING LAM. Autumn Sound for soprano and flute. RAVI SHANKAR. Sonata No. 1 for cello and harp (piano). TORU TAKEMITSU. From Far Beyond Chrysanthemums and November Fog for violin and piano. RAMIN HEYDARBEYGI. Aramesh for soprano, violin, cello and piano.


Envisioned as a journey through contemporary Asian music, Eastern Currents features chamber works written in the past forty years by composers from Azerbaijan, China, India, Iran, Japan and Taiwan.

Sara Paar - soprano

Mary Hubbell - soprano

Alice Jones - flute

Karen Rostron - violin

Marta Bedkowska-Reilly - cello

Mirna Lekić - piano

 


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ASTROLABE - Mirna Lekić, piano / Sara Paar, soprano

Music by ZAHRA PARTOVI / "Astrolabe" and "I died as Matter"

 

Selections from ASTROLABE are featured in Zahra Partovi's films: 

HANDS  

e pluribus unum

New York 2021

Thomas O'Connor Portrait


From the program notes by Zahra Partovi:

ASTROLABE is an instrument formerly used to tell time and make astronomical measurements, typically of the altitudes of celestial bodies, and in navigation for calculating latitude, before the development of the sextant. Metaphorically and poetically, the Astrolabe is associated with the revelation of mysteries and used in Persian poetry since Medieval period. 

The music in "Astrolabe" sweeps through, not only the dark and light of night and day, but also through the various emotional and bodily phases we travel through in a given 24-hour period. Between wakefulness and sleep, nine short pieces evoke the contrasting moments of our daily odyssey. 

If the piano music in this work is the microcosm of our daily travels, "I Died as Matter" song reveals the macrocosm of the larger human journey through life. www.zahrapartovi.com


HUMANISTIC PEDAGOGY ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES (Ed. by Amy E. Traver and Dan Leshem)

AVAILABLE at SPRINGER 

This volume presents insights from five years of intensive Holocaust, genocide, and mass atrocity education at Queensborough Community College (QCC) of the City University of New York (CUNY), USA, to offer four approaches—Arts-Based, Textual, Outcomes-Based, and Social Justice—to designing innovative, integrative, and differentiated pedagogies for today’s college students. The authors cover the theoretical foundations of each approach, and include faculty reflections on the programs, instructional strategies, and student reactions that brought the approaches to life across the disciplines.

Echoes of Exile: Genocide and Displacement Studies in the Undergraduate Music Curriculum
Mirna Lekić, André Brégégère
 
Textual Approaches to Mass Atrocity Education
Aliza Atik, Kathleen Tamayo Alves, Mirna Lekić

 


 

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                                                                                                                                                                       (Images: Shadow puppetry by Caroline Borderies)

 

LEKIĆ, MIRNA  -  SECRETS OF A TOY-BOX: A STUDY OF CLAUDE DEBUSSY'S LA BOÎTE À JOUJOUX 

 

DMA Dissertation (2014) 

CUNY Academic Works
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/443

Abstract

The influence of Claude Debussy's inventive musical language can be traced through to the most modern classical repertoire. Yet of the composer's three ballets, which provided the counterweight to the Russian dominance of Parisian ballet culture in the early 1900s, only Jeux has received substantial scholarly attention. The following document is a monograph on La Boîte à joujoux (1913), Debussy's innovative ballet for children or marionettes. It offers an exploration of the work's broader significance and contextualizes it both within Debussy's oeuvre and in a broader historical realm. Included is a survey of the ballet's performance history, as well as an analysis of its musical language, which establishes La Boîte à joujoux as a microcosm of Debussy's stylistic elements and an encyclopedia of allusions and direct borrowing from other composers, styles, folk and popular music.