With her chamber music piece Tre acque con ombre for five instruments, Charlotte Seither has created a work for the renowned “Milano Musica” festival 2013. In this, fantasy in sound and brilliance are required of the soloists.

Charlotte Seither has composed the ensemble work Tre acque con ombre for the “Milano Musica” festival. Three strings and bass clarinet and piano form a triangular constellation in which horizontal and vertical meet each other, laden with tension. Violin, viola and cello bring a linear motion into focus, generate a horizontal flow which repeatedly erupts, and in the process, is perforated by bass clarinet and piano. With powerful gestures these have a percussive function, generate punctuation and a contour, like a play of waves above the flow. Seither: “each instrument is autonomous within itself in the polyphony of the instruments. Despite this, a structure of two to three parts is built up in the groups.  In this the strings belong together in their openness and bareness, and by comparison the bass clarinet and piano are more strongly fragmented in their inability to speak and pursue a dissolving of the complete polyphony. The strings play strongly charged glissandi from time to time, which I like, because each glissando in its execution opens up the possibility of an almost unending psychology. In glissandi close to speech, which are played individually, each moment has a different speed and inner style, each becomes a linguistic gesture, has a meaning which I can recognise: negation, command or refusal. I have not previously made this into a theme. In performance terms, it is about the bodily gesture with which a glissando is completed.”

Tre acque con ombre is a virtuoso and powerful piece which demands much imagination on the part of the performers. “All the shapes require fantasy in sound with which brilliance, richness and tonal shape can constantly be generated. The piece demands that the musicians learn this intensively.” The open, imaginative title invites this.

Marie Luise Maintz
(translation: Elizabeth Robinson)
(from [t]akte 2/2013)