« Echoes in the Valley »
for violin, clarinet and piano

To the Verdehr Trio
Duration : about 10 minutes
1995

This chamber music grouping brings three instruments of very different making and individual features together. Their colour tones do not resemble each other, the quality of theit attack is of a totally different nature, the registers they cover are not the same.
The piano is the only one capable of playing in a really low register. Being a struck string polyphonic instrument, equipped with a pedal system and a large resonance chamber, it offers precious possibilities to make these instruments intermingle with each other.
Thus in this work, comprising two parts, a variety of different attacks and the resonance auras of the piano are fully developped. The piano will express sounds evoking all kinds of bells, - small or big, near or distant -, and will create, through its extended register, an expansive sound dimension, with occasional metrical pulses, but often complex without any apparent effect of beat.
The violin and clarinet are assigned to deliver the discourse : it will be sometimes in snatches, broken, tense, or wistful, as instruments imitate, answer, pursue each other, in connivance with the piano.
These pieces are of free chromatic atonal style with an impressionistic character.
The constituent elements are motives rather than themes, and in the second part one can remark the exploitation of symmetrical harmonic fields.

Unpublished

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