Original compositions

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THE MUSIC BOX

Original compositions digitally rendered in MP3 format

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Unetanneh Tokeph: Fantasia and Fugue on a Synagogue Melody

This piece, completed in October 2001, is based on two motifs from the liturgical music for the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), the most solemn occasion in the Jewish calendar. The title comes from a mediæval poem embodied in the service: Unetanneh tokeph qedushath hayyôm, “Let us then proclaim the holiness of the day”, whose traditional tune provides the theme and the four variations which follow. In a contrasting central section, a solo horn plays the music associated with the words “The book of records is opened, the still small voice is heard, and all the deeds of men are laid bare before you”, which is expanded in a passage with a quality at once pleading and processional. Finally, a trombone announces a modification of the opening theme which becomes the subject of an extended fugue.

Piano concerto in F minor: first movement

Why should anyone bother to write a pseudo-Rachmaninoff concerto when it is so widely felt that Rachmaninoff himself wrote at least one too many? I can only say that the second subject (given by piano and strings after about a minute) forced its way into my head some years ago and was so obviously part of a late-romantic piano concerto that I had virtually no choice but to build one round it. I am reserving it for a grand apotheosis at the end of the whole work (if the work ever has an end), which is why it is only indirectly hinted at throughout the rest of the movement.

The Long-Awaited: Millennial March

This shamelessly Edwardian piece (meant to be in the tradition of Elgar, although it has come out much more like Eric Coates) was written for Truro Sinfonia, an amateur orchestra in which I have the honour to be sub-principal viola (i.e. No. 2 of 2 at concerts and generally no. 1 of 1 at rehearsals)*. The title comes from Vergil's Æneid: Exspectate uenis (“Thou comest, O long-awaited!”). I have tried to convey something of doubt and foreboding in face of the unknown future, as well as triumph.

*They played it, too.

Divertimento in C, for ten wind instruments: first movement

Some clown pretending to be Gounod pretending to be Mozart.

String Quartet in G minor: Grave / Allegro (Rondo)

This quartet was my first completed work (1995). This recording begins with a short and rather mysterious (I think) transitional passage, ending with a quiet quotation of the main theme of the first movement and leading straight into the Rondo. This has a slightly eerie principal subject with three episodes, the third being a darkened and accelerated version of the first, while the second provides a moment of quirkish relaxation. The coda again quotes from the beginning of the whole work (in extended note-values on viola and cello while the violins, overhead, tear the rondo theme to pieces) before all the instruments are drawn into the fury of the closing bars.

Last Updated 19/12/04

Contact Oliver Mundy at : oliver.mundy@talk21.com