Scherzi di fantasia
image: Terry Smith
first performance:
Ruisi Quartet
Moscow State University
25 January 2020
duration: 10 minutes
programme note:
It is about as easy to wrestle with ectoplasm as it is to pin meaning on a fantasy; and certainly, the enigmatic persona of the present fantasia offers few clues. But to this commentator, it seems to belong to the distinguished British music tradition of landscape processionals, of a series of dissolving & reassembling perspectives unfolding across a nine-minute length. Its constituent facets are distinctive in character. We hear blocks of sound, glissandi, repeated note figures, tremolos, fragmentary jazz riffs and ticking mechanisms appearing and reappearing. Coordinating them all is the anchoring pitch of F, the tonal ringmaster as it were.
(David Wright)