Instrumentation: piano, string quartet
First Performance: First performance on 1 April, 2014, by Matan Porat, Solenne Païdassi, Albrecht Menzel, Hiyoli Togawa, and Simone Drescher.
Commissioned by the Internationales Musikfestival Heidelberger Frühling.
Duration: 10 minutes
Part 2 (with Winston Choi and Spektral Quartet, on New Focus Recordings):
These three pieces, written for the Heidelberger Frühling festival, take the spirit of the Beethovenian bagatelle as their starting point. Each is self-contained, with the first and third referencing specific pieces. The opening of the Coriolan Overture, with its forceful and magnetic sustained crescendo broken off by a loud chord – heard three times with ever greater tension – appears in fragmented form at the very opening, and then reveals itself more volcanically at the end of the movement. The third piece is an expansion of a solo piano piece written concurrently (Vanished Traces), and uses bits of the second movement of the Fifth Symphony, revealed at the onset, gradually pulled apart, then reassembled in the Coda, with an extended, melancholy allusion to the end of the theme. The middle movement makes no such references, but takes off from the insistent G that glues the first piece together. Three independent and unrelated elements are thrown together, each interrupting the other, until a series of static, pensive sonorities finally wins out.
Anthony Cheung