1990
for
Violin, cello and piano
Bright Sheng
Peabody Trio
1989 Chamber Music Competition
April 24, 1990
Bright Sheng, born in Shanghai in 1955, is a composer, conductor and pianist. His music reflects sustained engagement with Chinese folk traditions and Western concert music. A MacArthur Fellow, he studied in Shanghai and New York and joined the University of Michigan faculty in 1995.
Sheng’s program note describes four contrasting movements: a study in heterophony, a movement drawing on a Sichuan folk song, an energetic dance built from expanding sequences, and a final movement titled Nostalgia.
Bright Sheng is a composer, conductor and pianist whose work draws on his experience of Chinese and Western musical traditions. Born in Shanghai in 1955, he began piano lessons with his mother at four. During the Cultural Revolution he worked with a performing arts troupe in Qinghai, encountering regional folk music alongside his duties as a pianist and percussionist. He later studied at the Shanghai Conservatory, Queens College and Columbia University, and developed a close musical relationship with Leonard Bernstein. Sheng received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001. His catalogue includes orchestral and chamber music, concertos and operas, among them Dream of the Red Chamber, commissioned by San Francisco Opera. He joined the University of Michigan faculty in 1995.
Four Movements for Piano Trio was commissioned by the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation for the Peabody Trio, winner of the 1990 Naumburg Chamber Music Award. The folkloric style and prelude-like first movement of Four Movements for Piano Trio is constructed through the use of heterophony, a device typical of Asian music. The second movement of the work is based on a humorous and joyful folk song from Se-Tsuan. In the third movement, a savage dance, the melody grows through a series of "Chinese sequences" (my own term to describe a type of melodic development each time the initial motive is repeated, consequently lengthening its duration and widening the tessitura). The last movement evokes a lonesome nostalgia. - Bright Sheng