Harmonies of a fractured line

Four resonances of a Bach Chorale

Instrumentation : Piano Four-Hands

Duration : 10' Ca.

Year of Composition : 2025

Commissioned by Bach & now! Festival for Duo Villarceaux

Program notes

Commissioned by the Bach & Now! Festival for Duo Villarceaux, this four-movement work for piano four-hands traces its musical path through the Bach chorale “Wie wunderbarlich ist doch diese Strafe” (from St. Mattew passion). The chorale is the work’s organising thread: sometimes present only as an acoustic memory or structural residue, sometimes presented directly as quotation.

Each movement corresponds to one of the chorale’s four phrases. The first and third movements employ an elaborate interplay of sostenuto and sustain pedals to produce layered resonance: here the chorale appears as an echo, a lingering after-image that remains in the sound after more contemporary material has dissolved. By contrast, the second and fourth movements are shaped around two different Japanese haiku and culminate in explicit quotations of the chorale’s 2nd and 4th phrases in the low register—moments of quiet, grounded recitation that become part of the movements’ poetic closure.

Throughout the piece the chorale is heard in different guises—fragmented, resonant, and sometimes literal—so that by the end the listener experiences the chorale not as a single, linear statement but as a constellation of memories dispersed across the four movements.