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Home / Compositions / The spirit of the staircase

The spirit of the staircase (2009)

5 minutes
for piano trio

Commissioned by TriOz with financial assistance from the Music Board of the Australia Council for the Arts.

First performance by TriOz, City Recital Hall, Angel Place, Sydney, 17 November 2009

Buy Score (AMC)

Program note

This four-minute piece for piano trio was originally intended to be the ninth and final movement of my Nine Fantasies about Brahms, though it was composed ahead of the other movements and performed (by its commissioners, Trioz) before the first eight had even been written.

In fact, when it finally found its place at the end of a sequence of short Brahms-inspired miniatures, it turned out to be too long for its purpose, unbalancing the structure of the piece. So a shorter, snappier finale was composed, and this movement cut free to resume to its independent existence.

But this explains the quotation from Brahms and also the title – an esprit d’escalier, being a piece of repartee that occurs to you too late to be of use.

Instrumentations: Chamber music, Chamber music - mixed instrumentation

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