The famous duo Amandine en Laurence Beyer released a new online album performing Franck, Bartok and D’hoe. Enjoy this performance of his ‘Dances for Violin’.
In “Dances” (2014), a six-movement dance suite for solo violin and string orchestra, here transcribed to a version for violin and piano (2018), the Belgian composer Jeroen D’hoe (b. 1968) finds inspiration in the baroque dance suite and gives it a present-day approach by composing various new dances, which combine (traditional as well as modern) dance rhythms with a direct-expressive contemporary idiom.
“Dances” opens with an announcing, toccata-like “Commencement Dance”, in which a vigorous melodic motive with upbeat ascending gestures is being exchanged between violin and piano. The sense of excitement and anticipation in this movement is enhanced by the virtuoso solo-violin cadenza and the ‘extinguishing’ coda, which conclude the first movement and lead to the equally bubbly second movement “Round”, which borrows it title from its ‘circular’ melody (which seems to ‘renew’ its energy, each time it is being repeated and transposed). “Round” comprises four variations of a thematic statement, each time followed by an unexpectedly static-inert, bell-like repetition of one chord, in which the music seems to lose its momentum, but is renewed each time when the next thematic variation recommences. In the ensuing “Tango”, a sense of a muggy summertime laziness, which opens and closes the movement, envelops a more dynamic and typically passionate and punctuated dialogue between the violin and piano. The vivacious “Jig” – with its playful shifts between 6/8 and 3/4 meters – and the lyrical, meditative “Chaconne” – with its expansive melodic gestures – form a pair of dances, which both use a neo-modal idiom and feature contrapuntal cross-references. The continually fast final movement, “Ballet Mécanique with Spagnoletta”, ‘mechanically’ obsesses with a simple and captivating motive, which is being repeated, transposed and transformed extensively throughout the movement – even during the slightly slower “Spagnoletta” fragment, which briefly interrupts the compelling vigor, before the work is concluded with its last rush to the end.
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