Natura viva con glissandi III

Natura viva con glissandi is a cycle of three duo pieces for strings (violin, viola, cello) and piano. The original core of all pieces is a musical and instrumental gesture : the glissando. From a musical point of view, the paths generated and developed around this gesture are various and differentiated. Concerning technical and instrumental aspects, the compositional research focuses on the possible articulations of the « glissando » : the challenge was to simulate in the writing of the piano part, whose frequency range is definitively discretized, the perception of a continuous space in the interval movements, which is possible by nature with strings. According to this direction, different gestural combinations between the two instruments have been elaborated : the conception of the instrumentation was not as a duo in the most classical sense, but as a single hyper- instrument, whose two components expand their palette of technical and expressive ways of playing through mutual integration and assimilation processes.

The unity of the cycle is given by perceptively notable elements, such as : the reference pitches and the harmonic and tone material ; the reuse of similar gestural configurations in different contexts or in a way that generates diversified developments ; and, finally, the metric macro- structure, which is the same for all pieces.

Within this unity and organicity, the three pieces are individually characterized in a particuliar way (and in fact their distinct performance, as independent entities, is contemplated too) ; furthermore, the writing chosen for each string instrument aims at giving a sound image of it, in order to bring out extreme sound and expressive potentialities, beyond the expressive features it is traditionally linked to.