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Eve de Castro-Robinson  

At water's birth

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 2008
for piano trio

  • Instrumentation
    violin, cello, piano (some preparation required); all performers required to speak

    Piano preparation: the strings between c’’’ and a’’’ need to have a flat metal object laid on top to achieve a bright, jangly ringing sonority (especially from mm 26-37). This/these to be removed by the pianist in the section from m 45.

    The three strings F, G, A flat, should have firm rubber wedges between them to create a dull thuddy sonority (for the section at m42), but with a still discernible pitch
  • Programme Note

    At water’s birth is a meditative, ritualistic work, whose sonic palette includes prepared piano sonorities and some vocalising from the players, including whispering, spoken words and whistling.

    The pushing out of the boundaries of the conventional instrumental sounds is something I have employed in other works such as the whistling and knocking on the piano lid in small blue for piano and the bell and tamtam playing in Ring True. The meandering sections of the music suggest a relationship with the forces of water, its depth, currents and undercurrents and there is a sense of ritual in some of the chant-like rhythms.

  • Availability

Ross Carey  

Bagatelles

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 2005
for piano trio

  • Programme Note

    These twenty (mostly very brief) bagatelles were among the first pieces I wrote while on a one-month residency at the Visby International Centre for Composers in Gotland, a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea, in October 2005.

    The musical material I use in these Bagatelles I feel relates to my being in Europe (albeit a rather far-flung part) for the first time, and my subsequent reflection on my ‘European’ classical musical upbringing on the other side of the world in New Zealand. At times the music veers into irony, such as the violin caught in a maze of its own making (bagatelle 7) or the pianist unable to stop her rapid motions at either end of the keyboard (no. 14), sometimes to a laid-back jazzy feeling (no. 11) or quasi-improvisation (no 10); there are dance-like numbers too (4 and 19). The set ends with the longest bagatelle, a chromatic meditation over the open fifths of the cello and low register of the piano.

  • Availability

Michael Norris  

dirty pixels

Duration: 12' 00" Year: 2004
for piano trio

  • Programme Note

    dirty pixels was written in response to two stimuli: an exhibition of the same name (curator, Stella Brennan) in the Adam Art Gallery featuring New Zealand artwork of a certain rough-hewn, ‘gritty’ nature; and hearing the work Jagden und Formen by German composer Wolfgang Rihm, an unremittingly wild and preposterous discourse of extremes.

    These two stimuli caused something of an aesthetic dilemma: leaving behind my rather French fondness for euphonious washes of sound, I became interested in the characteristics of ‘roughness’ and ‘raggedness’, and in how a ‘pure’ conceptual scheme, such as the quite systematic construction I had formulated just prior to starting this piece, became ‘dirtied’ by intuition, by the exigencies of the material and by the reality of having it performed.

    Michael Norris
    Notes taken from The NZTrio – Spark Morrison Music Trust MMT2066

  • Availability

Wayan Gde Yudane  

Entering the Stream

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 2009
for piano trio

  • Instrumentation
    for piano, violin and cello
  • Programme Note

    The composer writes:

    Entering the stream
    as if a point of no return has been reached
    as light illuminating a moment of darkness
    or sound log passed into silence
    no trace remains, no desire or need
    the stream holds life in its sway
    constant flow, forever in a state of
    flux, of uncertainty, our thoughts
    and senses grasp the music
    our craving devours beauty
    yet the moment of realisation
    is when time receds
    as fast as we think
    we have possessed it.
    So, enter the stream
    for you will never
    be the same again
    you were never
    the same
    ever.

    Grateful thanks to NZTrio for commissioning this work, to Creative NZ for the funding to make that possible, and to Jack Body for being part of the process.

  • Availability

Mike Nock  

Fictional Realities

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 2001
for piano trio

Chris Gendall  

Intaglio

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 2006
for piano trio

Pieta Hextall  

Marx or Smith?

Duration: 11' 00" Year: 2007, r. 2008
for clarinet, viola and piano

Maria Grenfell  

Poems of a Bright Moon

Duration: 11' 00" Year: 2000
for flute, clarinet and piano

  • Instrumentation
    alto flute, B flat clarinet
  • Programme Note

    Poems of a Bright Moon for flute/alto flute, clarinet and piano was inspired by the Hsiang-Yang Songs of Li Po, an 8th-century Chinese poet of the T’ang Dynasty (ca.618-906 A.D.).

    On a visit to New Mexico in the United States, the discovery of the poet William Carlos Williams and the art work of Georgia O’Keeffe led to the poetry of Li Po, which conjures up visions of mountains and rivers, also very much part of the New Mexico landscape. Li Po was something of a mischievous travelling minstrel and liked to indulge in the drink somewhat. A legend says that “while out drunk in a boat, he fell into a river and drowned trying to embrace the moon.”

    The moon appears in over a third of his poems, and the opportunity to combine Li Po’s images of moonlight with the rich dark tones of the alto flute was irresistible. The individual titles of the movements of this piece come directly from the poems, and the music attempts to evoke the spirit of the titles: Hsien mountain rises above emerald Han river, On a moonlit night, a recluse plays his pale white ch’in and A pure ten-thousand-mile wind arrives.

    Poems of a Bright Moon was commissioned by Ethos trio with funding assistance from Creative New Zealand.

  • Availability

Ross Carey  

Seven Bagatelles

Duration: 11' 00" Year: 2000
for oboe, piano and marimba

  • Programme Note

    Seven bagatelles featuring (in numbers one to four) triadic motion, step-wise melodic figures and canonic movement; the fifth bagatelle is a recomposition of a late Beethoven Bagatelle; number six is scored for oboe and marimba and is a gentle melody and accompaniment; while the seventh bagatelle of the set is a passacaglia where the triadic and harmonic movement of the earlier pieces is effectively combined. Composed while I was Mozart Fellow at the University of Otago, and dedicated to Yasuko Takahashi and ‘Le Ciel Bleu’ of Antwerp.

  • Availability

Victoria Kelly  

Sono

Duration: 13' 00" Year: 2000
for piano trio

  • Instrumentation
    for piano, violin and cello
  • Programme Note

    The idea for this piece began with the Portuguese word “sono” which describes the felling of wanting to go to sleep – but in a mental rather than a physical way. In the case of this piece, the desire for sleep is inspired by wanting to rejoin a dream – and in my experience, it is always impossible to do this once having woken up.

    The trio begins with an impassioned even which soon disappears, leaving the piano alone to dream about it – and you will hear a repeating note emerge which sits throughout the music, representing the real world lingering in the background. Around this note, the dream wander, in chords and gestures on the piano, and in deep breaths and ascending melodies on the strings, which never quite seem to arrive at thier destination.

    Victoria Kelly
    Notes taken from The NZTrio – Spark, Morrison Music Trust MMT2066

  • Availability