Duo II

Duo (after Ossip Mandelstam) refers to a short poem from his 1910 collection Kamen (Stone), which underlies my piece: not only is this poem its epigraph, it is also quoted metrically throughout in the instrumental texture. Here are the first lines of the English translation:
Ears stretch sensitive sails,
dilated eyes lose fire,
over the silence swims
the night-birds’ soundless choir.
Even though a translation may give some idea of the images, I doubt that it conveys the respiration of this poem, its breath. But this was precisely what I wanted to do. So I decided to accomplish this simply: by “translating” the very first image by the sea wind. It begins with the viola, followed by the “voiceless choir” played by the cello with a vertically positioned bow. So the emergence of the real sound at the end of the first movement marks the transformation of wind into breath. The second movement has a concentric form which also developes in waves and gives the “voiceless choir” its voice. The final movement, Adagietto, adjusts the respiration to a regular pace – a reference to J. S. Bach. The coda, finally, goes back to the initial metaphor: breath = wind. (Victor Kissine)