Sonatina for violin and piano

About

I’m very glad to have received the opportunity to write for La Belle Alliance, a duo of Tessa Petersen and John Van Buskirk. These two Dunedin musicians were very supportive of my work when I held the University of Otago Mozart Fellowship in 2012: both feature on my soundtrack to Penny Ashton’s Austenian musical Promise & Promiscuity, and John performed my 2007 piece Maeve for piano and tape.

Commissioned to deliver them a piece of no more than seven minutes, I applied the semi-official rate of composer inflation to make it something more like eight. Maybe eight and a half. (Still within the standard deviation.*) Early in the writing process I settled on a classic three-movement structure – given the total expected duration, this forced me to keep my ideas tight. (-Ish.) The journey of this work resembles my 2009 Sonatina for clarinet and piano, and given that both works are equally non-programmatic, I might as well recycle the title.

The opening moves from the high, tinkly and glassy to the brassily funky. The middle movement is based on a sparse melody I created in the moment alongside actors Christine Brooks and Rik Brown in their 2014 New Zealand Fringe Festival improv show. The finale is skittish and spiccato, featuring a rather quick theme that sits pretty nicely under my right hand on piano. All three movements are linked with a short bossa nova tune full of 9th chords, which gets reinterpreted according to the prevailing musical feel.

* I never studied Statistics. I’m probably using this term wrong.

I would really like to hear the [other] world premiere again.

High-register passages from both instruments, funky statements, a catchy bossa nova theme, lots of spiccato and extreme violin effects – all had the listener wondering what titillating aural effect would come next.

– Elisabeth Bouman, Otago Daily Times, 15 May 2014