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Programme Note

CEMBAL D’AMORE is a five-movement suite for harpsichord and piano which works with the timbres of two very different-sounding instruments. The composer says that he ‘hears early music through the tears of centuries’. This moving formulation comes to expression in the work, in the sense that the early music glitters, so to speak, as a poetically imaginative undertone, through the highly contemporary structure. At one point the old music emerges so strongly in the sound-picture that it becomes quite tangible: a sarabande by Händel. Just as the external appearance of the instruments embodies the opposition between ancient and modern, the work itself profiles a meticulously calculated tension between archaizing expression and contemporary construction.