Ensemble: violin, viola, cello, piano
Duration: 16’
Written: 2017
Premiere: 11.08.2018., Teresa Ling (violin), Evelyn Grau (viola), Isaac Melamed (cello), Jeanette Fang (piano), USA, Hot Springs, Garth Newel Music Center.
Award: the piece won the 2018 Garth Newel Award selected from more than 90 entries.
Program note:
„Accusativus, the winning piano quartet of our 2018 Composition Competition by Balázs Kecskés, recalls the harmonic language of the Romantic period, but with a subtlety that takes it away from the drama and excesses that also characterize that period. So much of the great composers of the past still live on in the today’s young composers, whether intentionally or not. When we went through the score of Accusativus, we thought Balázs Kecskés must have been paying homage to Brahms, because his last movement is built around a tender sighing figure that recalls the opening of Brahm’s G major violin sonata.
When asked about it, he told us he had not been consciously thinking of that work, or even Brahms, when he was composing the piece. The same heartfelt impulses behind that rhetorical motive for Brahms was also behind Balázs even though he was born more than 150 years later.
Accusativus is a suite of 5 short movements, which progress through different characters of meditative, driving, tender, boisterous, and reflective. Balázs creates mesmerizing moments of suspended beauty, with an ear for stillness and reverie that makes one think of Debussy.”
/Jeanette Fang/