PIANO QUINTET

Year of composition: 2018
Instrumentation: piano and string quartet
Duration: 12′

Commissioned by the inaugural Graham Sommer Competition for Young Composers

Premiere: Sara Laimon, piano, and Quatuor Molinari
Pollack Hall, Montreal
September 29, 2018

PROGRAMME NOTE

The opening two measures of Beethoven’s String Quartet no. 13, op. 130 act as a generating idea for my Piano Quintet. The phrase begins with a chromatic line that descends in unison to the pitch G played on open strings, and then fans out to a C minor chord that initiates a cadential progression featuring contrary motion in the outer lines. In my work I develop two characteristic elements of this phrase, namely its voice-leading symmetry and its structurally central ‘G’. The former element I subject to new configurations in registral space, producing new, abstracted images of Beethoven’s phrase; the latter element comes to serve as a focal point in the pitch structure of the Quintetaround which new ideas kaleidoscopically emerge and morph. The source material continues to loom throughout the work, occasionally revealing itself in moments of structural clarity to mark key points in its form.

Score excerpt

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION