Prospero for violin and piano (1994)

Publisher: Ms. (performance material upon request)

Duration: ca. 7′

FP: May 18, 1995, Dresden (Gesine Kalbhenn, Daniel Heyne)

Further performances:

June 18, 1996, Teplice (Czech premiere)
June 20, 1996, Dresden
Dec 6, 1997, Dresden
Nov 4, 1998, Dresden
May 9, 1999, Helsinki (Finnish premiere, Kristin Deeken/Benjamin Schweitzer)
Jan 17, 2000, Munich
April 19, 2001, Weimar
July 2, 2001, Dresden
April 4, 2003, Stein am Rhein (Swiss premiere, Ekkehard Windrich/Benjamin Schweitzer)
Aug 2, 2005, Bergen (Dutch premiere, Holland Music Sessions)
Jan 28, 2009, Venice (Italian premiere, Ensemble l’arsenale)
Jan 29, 2009, Rome

Introduction:

“Dost thou hear?” – “Your tale, Sir, would cure deafness.”
(Shakespeare, The Tempest, I,2)

Twelve years the expelled duke of Milan, Prospero, has to wait for his days of revenge in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It was the proportion of long back-story and a concentrated main plot which inspired me for this composition’s dramaturgy. Thus, this work consists of a long opening section of rapidly decreasing density, combined with a fast, compressed eruption. Within this, the piece consists of a series of variations on the bipartite entrance complex, where the first part becomes slower and longer, while the second accelerates and becomes shorter with every variation (reflecting the overall time-structure of the work).

The formal conception, however, stays in the background in favour of many details: an atmosphere of ‘dreamy’ counterpoint; the exploration of new aspects of a conventional chamber music instrumentation and apparently worn out tone material (thirds, fourths and fifths are widely used); deveolping a melodic line and then tenderly deconstructing it; condemning the piano to almost total idleness until close to the ending…