Brian Ferneyhough - String Trio (1995)

String Trio (1995)
Composer: Brian Ferneyhough (b. 1943)
Performers: Arditti String Quartet: Irvine Arditti & Ashot Sarkissjan, violin; Ralf Ehlers, viola; Lucas Fels, cello.
______________________________________________________________________

"Unlike the string quartet, the trio genre has never developed a clear tradition. Emerging, as it did, from the baroque trio sonata rather than the dynamic developmental lineage of the Classical sonata-allegro form, it has tended to remain curiously uncertain as to its own specific identity. During the 19th century the string trio was not a frequently encountered combination and, in spite of a number of key works by leading composers of our own century (Schoenberg, Webern) it has remained an 'outsider' in the corpus of chamber music formations.

My own String Trio attempts to take this lineage into account, particularly with respect to the ambiguity of expressive ductus, which fluctuates uneasily between the serenade-like and the more densely linear-developmental approach customarily associated with the string quartet medium. There are four main sections, the first of which exposes three successive solos (viola, violin, cello) of varying, readily identifiable character, each immediately followed by its own 'amplification' in all three instruments; the second is basically a set of 'variations on an absent theme' in a consistently fast tempo, to which the third, a Largo desolato based on multiple scannings of the single, static chordal formation heard in the solo viola at the outset of the work, provides a strong contrast. The final main section might perhaps be seen as an abbreviated combination of scherzo and rondo features, beginning as it does with multiple glissandi in high register and becoming progressively more violent and polyphonic as it moves down into lower regions.

Separating these main segments are punctuating statements of four brief types of 'Intervention' texture which, in the course of the work's unfolding, gradually come to assume responsibility for the substance of the discourse - so much so, indeed, that, by the end, the final statement of Intervention I is heard as an expansively fragile movement in its own right, gradually transposing downward the static chordal structure encountered earlier until it disappears out of the ensemble's bottom range. Characteristic of both this category of Intervention and the Largo desolato is the consistent employment of eighth-tone microintervals.

String Trio was commissioned by the Festival d'Automne de Paris for Contrechamps, to the members of whose trio the work is collectively dedicated."

~Brian Ferneyhough
Source: CD booklet
_________________________________________________________________

For education, promotion and entertainment purposes only. If you have any copyrights issue, please write to unpetitabreuvoir(at)gmail.com and I will delete this video.