PIOTR GRELLA-MOZEJKO (b.1961): ...River to the Ocean..., JEAN LESAGE (b.1958): Le Livre des Mélancolies, TIM BRADY (b.1956): Slow Dances.

Description: Grella-Mozejko's work consists of a continuous, highly ornamented soliloquy for the solo clarinet with subtle, atmospheric accompaniment by the quartet. The clarinet sings its melancholy song against a rustling, fluid texture of harmonics and glissando chords and clusters, poetic and gently meandering. Lesage's work refers to the concept of Melancholy as defined as one of the Hippocratic four temperaments; the music inhabits a disturbed, detached and fragmentary realm; perhaps closer to that of the schizophrenic in modern psychological terminology. There is a sense of foreboding and concealed menace in the innocent-sounding melodic fragments which combine atonally to suggest the fractured logic of the disturbed mind. Brady's Slow Dances distort dance forms almost to the point of unrecognizability, suggesting hallucinatory memories of dances rather than the dances themselves, veiled in the opium-smoke of gliding microtones from the strings. The 'solo' movement functions as a kind of cadenza for the clarinettist. Jean-Guy Boisvert (clarinet), Quatuor Bozzini.