w14055
| Title | Piano Quintet |
| Contributors |
Julian Wagstaff (composer) |
| Composition date | 2002 |
| Duration (mins) | 19 |
| Category | chamber mixed quintet |
| Instrumentation | Pf 2 Vn Va Vc |
| Commissioned by | |
| Key signature | |
| First line | |
| First performed | 24 04 2003 Capriccio Quartet and Alina Kolonitskaya Reid Concert Hall, Edinburgh |
| Notes | Julian Wagstaff’s Piano Quintet was written in 2002 for the Russian-born soloist Alina Kolonitskaya, to whom the work is dedicated. The first performance was given in the Reid Concert Hall, Edinburgh on 24th April 2003 as part of a concert given by the Capriccio Quartet and Alina Kolonitskaya. The first recording of the work was made in the Queens Hall, Edinburgh and appears on the Edinburgh Quartet album Frontiers and Bridges, performed by the Edinburgh Quartet and the original soloist. The CD bears the catalogue number CR1014 and is available on the Circular Records label. It was released on 1st November 2007. |
| Programme Note | Composer’s Note : The piano quintet configuration lends itself in particular to what I wished to achieve with this work on a conceptual level, which was to explore certain harmonic gestures whose reference points lie within my own “spiritual home” of rock and theatre music, but to do so with reference to the formal structures associated with Western art music - in this case Romanticism. The work is cast in three movements, the slow second movement contrasting with the more urgent nature of the first and third. The first movement combines traditional sonata form with the rhapsodic approach to structure familiar to fans of progressive rock music. The extensive piano cadenzas refer simultaneously to the age of the soloist-as-composer in concert music, and the cult of the virtuosic guitar or keyboard soloist which endures in certain branches of rock music today. The slow second movement is essentially song-like in structure, following an ABCBCA’ form. The overt references to Russian music (both its “high art” and popular variants) are part-serious, part-playful references to the original soloist’s cultural roots. The third and final movement is an unapologetic fugue, based upon a highly chromatic and unusually extended subject - precisely ten-and-a-half bars in length. The short introductory section which begins the work may be heard as a kind of cipher, a microcosm of the work as a whole, whose logic can be traced through the development of the first violin’s thematic exposition in the first movement, through the harmonic and referential interplay of the second, to the anarchic rebellion at the end of the third, which culminates in the re-establishment of order - of a sort - in the parallel octaves which end the piece. © Julian Wagstaff, 2007 |
This work is associated with the following collection items:
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