SKU: BT.MUSM570360130

English.

For Violin and Cello. Published 2008. Dedicated to Peter Sheppard Skaerved and Neil Heyde. This music was composed during my DAAD residency in Berlin in October — November 2007. If I were to describe it in one sentence, I would say that it is based on the idea of 'two things seen/heard as one'. a2 (a due) is a well-known term to musicians; it is often found in orchestral scores indicating a given passage that is to be played by two instruments of the same family. Although violin and cello could well be regarded as 'first cousins' of the string family, the literal implementation of the term a2 as a 'compositional strategy' would have been too much (!) for a piece of chamber music consisting of no more than two players. Not surprisingly, this never happens in this work; in fact, the opposite is true: regardless of how it appears on paper (i.e. on one or two staves), the music for each instrument is constantly based on two layers. This musical 'interpretation' of the title gives an indication as to how the textural format of the piece operates. However, this was by no means the only thought that 'preoccupied' my mind whilst composing this music. Berlin made a profound impression on me. The remnants of the wall in Bernauer Straße and the cobbled two-stone line tracing the wall across where it once stood — a clear reminder of what not so long ago there were two different worlds in one city — provoked a strikingly dramatic effect. Border, death-strip, killing, and escape to freedom had a particularly evocative resonance, especially of the time when I lived for three years in a remote town in Southern Albania right at the border with Greece. There, there was a nameless road whose destination the authorities did not want you to know, but the locals called it the 'death-road'. In no way programmatic, in this context, the extra-musical dimension of the principal idea is very much part of the piece. Here, the musical and extra-musical interpretations cannot easily be separated, for they are two parts of the same thing: a2. As if to add another dimension to this idea, there are two versions of this piece: for viola & cello and violin & cello. The first version was premiéred by Garth Knox and Rohan de Saram at the 2008 Intrasonus Festival in Venice..

SKU: HL.51481531

UPC: 840126989311. 9.25x12.25x0.361 inches.

Mendelssohn is considered a self-critical composer, who repeatedly reworked a number of his pieces until he deemed them worthy to be published. The path to his first Piano Trio was particularly rocky: only after several attempts was he able to complete it in the summer of 1839; it appeared in 1840 after further revisions. This perfectionism paid off, for Mendelssohn's D Minor Trio was immediately received with enthusiasm. Robert Schumann wrote: “It is the master trio of the present day, like those of Beethoven in Bb and D and that of Franz Schubert in Eb were in their time; a very beautiful composition which after years will still delight grandchildren and great-grandchildren.” Which was to prove true: even today, it numbers among the most popular works in the trio repertoire in general. The trio, taken from the volume Mendelssohn • Piano Trios HN 957, is now available from Henle for the first time also as a practical single edition.

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