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Fugal Fantasia subtitled ‘Mysterious Mountain Peaks’ is a celebration for strings, harp and tam-tam of the Baroque and of Nature.
It consists of a Prelude, Fugue and Postlude freely based on an air by Purcell.
Throughout the piece the Baroque is symbolised as a magnificent, elusive mountain. The music is both a search for and a celebration of this mountain.
Mount Baroque’s brooding nocturnal presence is depicted in the Prelude’s opening bars. As these fragments develop into a theme, the search is underway for the sound of the Baroque. When the music reaches a climax it is a neo-romantic climax rather than a baroque one, which quickly dissolves into the movement’s mysterious opening bars, the mountain’s majestic peak veiled in mist and night.
The energetic large-scale Fugue is a depiction of Mount Baroque in full diurnal glory. The reflective moments at its heart echo to the sounds of birds and insects. After a short expressive interlude, built on the fugal subject, the fugue returns, its subject now inverted, its musical character increasingly dissonant and agitated. The movement ends with a rhythmically altered statement of the fugal subject on high solo cello.
The lyrical Postlude, the work’s closing movement, is a pictorial imagining of distant figures ascending and descending the mountain’s precipitous slopes. The rising and falling lines of the music build to a climax before Purcell’s air at last makes its appearance.
Fugal Fantasia lasts for about 12 minutes.
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Cape Town
South Africa