Recording by Randall Goosby (violin), Yin-Ying Tseng (viola), John Henry Crawford (cello), and Yandi Chen (piano).
Winner of the 2018 Prix Ravel.
NOTES:
"Wunderlicher Alter
Soll ich mit dir geh'n?
Willst zu meinen Liedern
Deine Leier drehn?
“Strange old man,
Should I go with you?
Will you turn your hurdy-gurdy
to my songs, too?”
"Der Leiermann, "the last song of Schubert's cycle Die Winterreise, ends with a moment of hesitation before a tragic end. The protagonist asks the hurdy-gurdy player, evoked by the piano and long thought to represent death, "soll ich mit dir gehen?" ("should I go with you?"). In Schubert's composition, the protagonist and death are placed in a one-to-one relationship, and our emotions center around pity as death takes the protagonist with him. My piano quartet takes as its starting point the question of what would happen if rather than just one protagonist, a group of people meet Schubert's hurdy gurdy player? What would be the dynamic within the collective if, in the face of a shared fatalism, they ask themselves "soll ich mit dir gehen?" These questions take on political significance in our current state of emergency. Through my music, I am interested in exploring how the emotional content of Schubert's "Der Leiermann" can be transposed, re-examined, and transformed for our time, and what audiences can learn from working through these questions together.