Commissioned by Ben Goldscheider and At The World’s Edge Festival with funding from Vaughan Williams Foundation

Commissioner exclusivity applies

Premiered by The Goldscheider Trio at The Lammermuir Festival on 14 September 2023. Second performance: Ben Goldscheider, Alice Neary and Benjamin Baker playing on 12 October 2023 at The Cloudy Bay Shed, Cromwell as part of At The World's Edge Festival 2023.

  • hn/vn.vc
  • 12 min

Programme Note

After Farrera for horn, violin and cello.

My trio is named for a village high in the Catalan Pyrenees; over the years I have made a composing retreat at Farrera’s Centre D’Art I Natura. It is a wonderful location, in an expansive landscape that is perhaps reflected in my short trio. The trio is a fantasia lasting around twelve minutes. Much of the surface of the music is fast, bold and active; but it is underpinned by slower moving harmonies, often held by the strings in a recurrent, chorale- like texture. Shadows in the harmony are created by natural harmonics and microtones. As in my solo horn piece After Lindisfarne, I have delighted in exploring the horn’s beautiful tone colour and its capacity for timbral variation. This is very apparent towards the end, when the horn’s melodic line suggests a lullaby, coloured by simple inflections.

The trio was commissioned by Ben Goldscheider and is dedicated to him, in admiration of his playing.

The premiere will be given at the Lammermuir Festival, September 14th 2023, by Ben Goldscheider and members of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective. Funds for the commission were provided by the Vaughan Williams Foundation and by the co-commissioner, At the World’s Edge Festival, New Zealand.