Commissioned for the Viney-Grinberg Duo by the University of Queensland
First performance by Viney-Grinberg Duo (Liam Viney and Anna Grinberg), ABC Studio 420, Brisbane, 21 September 2014
Program note
The phrase ‘on reflection’ generally implies quiet contemplation, perhaps leading to a change of heart, but that’s not what I had in mind here. Conventionally, in a piece for two pianos, the players sit facing one another, their instruments stretched out between them. They are mirror images of each other, and that is what this piece explores. The players’ parts respond to and often imitate each other. Sometimes the imitation is rhetorical: the piece opens with piano one playing the highest E on the keyboard and holding it; player two immediately responds with its lowest E, played as a very dry staccato. But the piece also contains canonic writing in which the imitation is strict. At one point, the canon is just a quaver (eighth note) apart. Suffice it to say there is nothing in either player’s part that doesn’t have some sort of equivalence in the other’s.
On Reflection was composed for Liam Viney and Anna Grinberg – the Viney-Grinberg Duo – by the University of Queensland, and first performed by them on 21 September 2014 at the ABC Studio 420, Brisbane.