P.S.
Dear Dr. Siegert,
I’m Ernesto Mateo, the pianist of the Yann Tiersen concert last Friday in El Hierro. [...] Actually, I assembled the team just for this specific event, so we don’t have a group name because we don’t play together very often; we collaborate on different projects with different people throughout the year. I’m myself a freelance pianist and composer, so I usually give a call to some of my colleagues and friends when I think of a new project, as it was the case here.
In this case, I can tell you that I have always liked the music by Yann Tiersen since I listened to it when Amelie was released. I have a strong connection with this type of music that fuses classical with pop and minimal. Some years ago I bought this toy piano because I wanted to compose a piece for me and a flautist, and wrote a toy piano concerto instead (link below if you are interested). I really love this instrument, and in the premiere of the concerto I played a piece from Amelie as an encore. Years later I met Tania, who is our singer and percussionist, and we started to play together minimal music (Wim Mertens, Arvo Part, Satie and similar composers).
I used the toy piano also in my latest album, which is called “Las playas vacías”. We premiered it at the Pérez Galdós Theater in Las Palmas, and Tania, who is also a writer and an actress, conducted the spectacle creating the scenography for it. This was last year.
Our violinist is José Luis Montesdeoca, whom I met some years ago, he was a member of an orchestra that played one of my compositions. He told me that he liked the music very much, so we also started to play together. This year we made an album, “Vivo”, that fuses canary folklore with electronics, and we premiered it at the Elder Museum in Gran Canaria. It was great fun.
The accordionist, Pablo R. Álamo, is the youngest of us, I contacted him directly to play at this Tiersen project, as the accordion is a fundamental piece of the sonority.
This is the link to my latest album (the piece with features the toy piano is the last one):
https://open.spotify.com/intl-es/album/3cSjKdJr0Fj4zL1ie50Taq
The first movement of the toy piano concerto:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfuasP8bMCk&list=RDJfuasP8bMCk&start_radio=1
.
The violin and electronics album:
https://open.spotify.com/intl-es/album/1Xl4LLWzrdeYN6zT8Tojxv
Ernesto Mateo
www.ernestomateo.com
