String Trio violin, viola and cello (1959) | Works

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Year: 1959
Duration: 8'
Category: Instrumental
Premiere: 21 May 1959
Hertz Hall, University of California, Berkeley
Oleg Kovalenko, violin / John Graham, viola / Rene Sharp, cello
Dedication: Dedicated to Seymour Shifrin
Buy Score: Boosey & Hawkes

Written in 1959, during my last year as a college student and first year as a composer, Trio was inspired by my first hearing of the Schoenberg Trio. I had never before heard "modern" string effects—sul ponticello, col legno, battuto, harmonics, etc.—and these new sounds filled me with awe and wonder. Trio was the result.

- David Del Tredici

The present disc includes the String Trio (1959) again played by members of Spectrum Ensemble Berlin, and the four Fantasy Pieces for piano (1960), played by the composer. Here, as in such contemporaneous pieces as the Scherzo for piano four-hands (also 1960), the expressive thread that runs through all Del Tredici's music is much in evidence, despite the outer trappings of serialism and other modernist creeds.

David Del Tredici's early was also - played. Written in 1959, it already displayed the juxtaposition of wacky energy and nocturne-like serenity that Del Tredici was to develop so brilliantly in his later Alice in Wonderland works.

David Del Tredici has made his name in even more elaborate romantic recreations based on Lewis Carroll. Iin his early days, however, he was dazzled by Schoenberg, as the String Trio (1959) and Fantasy Pieces for Piano (1960) demonstrate. The former is inspired by Schoenberg's own trio, the latter by the distilled essence of 12-tonal gnomic utterance.

String Trio

Instrumental