Knussen, Oliver: Reflection
sheet music
Instrumentation: Violon et piano
Pages: 32 pp
Date du parution: 2 janvier 2019
Editeur: Faber Music
Numéro d’édition: 0571520561
ISMN: 9780571520565
This enchanting 8-minute piece for violin and piano - Oliver Knussen's penultimate work - is made up of various kinds of musical reflection: melody reflected in its inversion, a six-note mode reflected in its complement, and the relationships between the three main parts of the piece, which are in a way varied reflections of each other. There are some reflections in water, too, the work's opus number (31a) demonstrating a relationship to Knussen's unfinished Cleveland Pictures: ‚The main melody began as a response to Gauguin's painting of a Breton woman swimming', Knussen wrote, ‚and there is also, perhaps, an echo of the lonely underwater world of an ondine, eventually breaking the surface at the end of the piece.'