Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Work Overview

This sonata attempts a détente with the artistic world of Paris, circa WWI. The first movement deals with Gabriel Fauré's late song 'Eau vivante' from 'La chanson d'Ève': a miracle of unstable continuity. In Fauré, a constantly refreshed single line weaves through the piano beneath an unbroken surface of delicate harmony: a perfected vision of water in the Garden of Eden.

Eau vivante is an attempt to analyse, synthesise and dip into this spring of harmony, yet is in a process of constant failure. I find it fascinating when a series of musical events which achieve a harmonious result in Fauré can be run aground, taken to extremes and led into impossible dead-ends. I have tried, more than a century later, to reconstruct the rarefied atmosphere conjured by the isolated, near-deaf Fauré at the turn of the 20^th Century. Can we really dream of an untrammelled natural world in 2021?

If this movement is a thwarted, unreachable heaven, the second movement is a short, paralysed Purgatory, effortfully going nowhere.

The last movement attempts a more Proustian synthesis between remembered images of heaven and hell, initially presented strictly in alternation but the one continually bleeding into the other to form an unholy, messy reality. Bacchanals, bells and an unexpected berceuse transform dying embers of Fauré-memory and purgatorial inertia into an uneasy repose.

Work Details

Year: 2021

Instrumentation: Cello, piano.

Duration: 17 min.

Difficulty: Advanced

Contents note: I.   Eau vivante -- II.   Intermède (Purgatoire) --III.  Entre les jardins du paradis et de l’enfer.

Commission note: Commissioned by Kim Williams, The ANAM Set for performance by Blair Harris with funds provided by Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM), Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) Fund.

The composer notes the following styles, genres, influences, etc in relation to this work:
Gabriel Fauré, Marcel Proust