---

Programme Note

Bright Sheng, violinist Cho-Liang Lin, and cellist Eric Kim introduce and perform Four Movements

Composer Note:
Four Movements for Piano Trio was based on the musical materials of My Song, a work I composed for solo piano in 1988. Similar to the piano work, I was trying to search for my "own" concept of tonality. For me, the best way is to unify my mother tongue (Oriental classical and folk music) and my father tongue (Western classical music). In addition, I was very much aware of the virtuosity of the Peabody Trio during the process of the composition.

The folklore style and prelude-like first movement is constructed through the development of heterophony, a typical device of Oriental music. The third movement is a savage dance in which the melody grows through a series of "Chinese sequence" (a self-invented term to describe a way of melodic development in Chinese folk music, in which each time the initial motive is repeated, it increases the number of notes and consequently enlarges the spaces of duration and tessitura). The last movement is a lonesome solitude of Nostalgia.

—Bright Sheng