---

Programme Note

First performance:
February 8 2013
Britten Sinfonia
Assembly House, Norwich, UK

Composer note:
Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was an influential Russian abstract painter whose works — due to both his artistic interests and his personal friendships with Schoenberg and other musicians — have always been closely associated with music. Kandinskiana is not an attempt to recreate in sound any individual Kandinsky painting but rather an attempt to realise the process of creating a Kandinsky painting. One model is Succession, in which Kandinsky generates a series of fascinatingly organic figures from basic geometric shapes, accompanied by constant horizontal lines. Another is the forms of Composition VIII and Dominant Curve, where lines lead the eye from the relatively spare edges of the canvas to areas of enormous complexity around central vanishing points. Musically the conception is similar; a beginning and ending of relative simplicity lead into and away from music of greater density, and the predominant consonance of the individual melodic lines stacks up to create more "naturalistic" harmonies and timbres.

— Jay Greenberg