BALLADES (2025)

Ballades inhabits a musical world of stories and fantasy, its title chosen for its evocation of narrative and dramatic contrast. It suggests an unfolding sequence of musical tales, rich in shifting colours, harmonies, times and places – conjuring imagined scenes through sound.

The first of four movements, Prologue, is cast in a straightforward arch form. It sets the stage by laying bare the work’s principal material, erupting immediately with a forceful four-note gesture that propels the music forward with urgency.

Nocturne Liminal, the second movement, is a rondo preceded by an introduction that conjures an ethereal, liminal (threshold-like) landscape of unplaceable sounds: insects, shadows and echoes. At its centre lies a grandioso flanked by two scherzo passages.

Élégie, in sonata form with coda, is a movement of transformation and inward reflection. It explores isolation, conflict, and the hazy glow of memory, building tension and darkening inexorably toward a broad climax. At this point of collapse, the music dissolves. The piano intonates the second subject in a mournful, nostalgic expression, yielding at last to a single muted violin cantilena that closes the movement.

Continuing the concluding mood of the previous movement, the final and longest – Sérénade Obsidienne – begins with hushed pizzicato motives in the strings. The word obsidienne refers to a volcanic glass: black, smooth, and lustrous, yet brittle – fracturing into razor-sharp edges. The title evokes nocturnal scenes poised on the brink, always ready to shift or rupture at any moment.

Following a brief introduction that recalls earlier material, a yearning, beckoning motif emerges on the violin: two falling tritones played as harmonics. This figure recurs throughout the movement, growing in expressive weight. It blossoms into a seductive song above sparse piano chords, unfolding as a journey through variations, including a waltz, gamelan-inspired textures, and a tarantella. As the music unfolds, tension mounts relentlessly, erupting into a distorted, brutal last dance in irregular rhythms and culminating in a fierce, uncompromising coda.