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Programme Note

For two nights running it was impossible for me to sleep very much. I was haunted by a phrase from Capriccio by Stravinsky, the point in the second movement where a few serious sixths are followed by a quasi-Baroque trill - (and then there’s the fact that you aren’t quite sure that Stravinsky is being so serious after all). My sleeplessness because of this phrase was all the stranger since I hadn’t heard the work for many years.

You have to take that sort of message from the subconscious seriously, so I put the phrase into my ‘loom’ and out came some odd note formations that to me seemed most of all like some harpsichord master’s ‘late night improvisations’. And as given, so used.

As luck would have it, it made perfect sense to use the final chords of the second movement from Stravinsky’s underrated concerto for piano and winds to close my little meditation over his two bars from Capriccio. Some really sentimental, ‘retro’ bars. Stravinsky too had a soft centre.

Asbjørn Schaathun