Luytens String Trio
Dec. 21st, 2014 06:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzy_daveAnother piece of music from the woefully neglected Elisabeth Luytens her String Trio from 1964.
"String Trio, iii: Poco presto" by Endymion
Composed for, and premiered by, the Oromonte Trio at the ICA in 1964, the String Trio is something of an extreme even in Lutyens' output in its demands on performer and listener alike -- just as Webern's String Trio, Op. 20 marked an extreme in his. Lutyens associated the Webern with her first encounters with Edward Clark, and evidently strove for a comparably self-transcendent achievement. The first of her five movements is already a complex mosaic of compressed gestures and glancing nuances. The second distills a mood of restless stasis in just 12 pianissimo bars. The fat third is a test of ensemble playing as the three instruments alternately phrase together then fly apart, while the curiously sauntering, intermezzo-like fourth is a test of continuity. Then, as the fifth movement announces itself in a jagged recitative, one begins to sense another model behind Webern. Along with Debusy and Webern Lutyens named Beethoven as her third favorite composer.
After a few bars hesitation, her finale launches itself in a fierce dialectic of jagged figures mitigated only by a sparser trio section at its centre. As a sometime string player herself, Lutyens must have intended a sense of struggling for the impossible. Where have we heard this kind of struggle before? Lutyens finale is not a little like a Webernian miniaturization of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge.
Hece this is the book i shall be reading over the holiday period.
"String Trio, iii: Poco presto" by Endymion
Composed for, and premiered by, the Oromonte Trio at the ICA in 1964, the String Trio is something of an extreme even in Lutyens' output in its demands on performer and listener alike -- just as Webern's String Trio, Op. 20 marked an extreme in his. Lutyens associated the Webern with her first encounters with Edward Clark, and evidently strove for a comparably self-transcendent achievement. The first of her five movements is already a complex mosaic of compressed gestures and glancing nuances. The second distills a mood of restless stasis in just 12 pianissimo bars. The fat third is a test of ensemble playing as the three instruments alternately phrase together then fly apart, while the curiously sauntering, intermezzo-like fourth is a test of continuity. Then, as the fifth movement announces itself in a jagged recitative, one begins to sense another model behind Webern. Along with Debusy and Webern Lutyens named Beethoven as her third favorite composer.
After a few bars hesitation, her finale launches itself in a fierce dialectic of jagged figures mitigated only by a sparser trio section at its centre. As a sometime string player herself, Lutyens must have intended a sense of struggling for the impossible. Where have we heard this kind of struggle before? Lutyens finale is not a little like a Webernian miniaturization of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge.
Hece this is the book i shall be reading over the holiday period.
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Date: 2014-12-21 07:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-22 01:31 am (UTC)Hugs, Jon