Tres danzas seculares
- Instrumentation
- Cello, Piano
- Composed
- 1994
- Duration
- 8'
- Publisher
- Peermusic Classical
Purchase or download
About this piece
Mario Lavista wrote Tres danzas seculares for cello and piano in 1994 and dedicated it to the Mexican cellist Carlos Prieto. Prieto gave the Spanish premiere with pianist Chiky Martín at the Fundación Juan March in Madrid on 25 September 1996. In a note reproduced in that programme, Lavista says the three dances try to "make audible" three moments in the courtship of imaginary birds. The first is a slow dialogue within a slowly moving harmonic field. The second is a fast movement built on an ostinato on the note A, heard first in the cello and then the piano, with a melodic counterpoint in constantly changing meters. The third is a slow-fast finale whose homophonic introduction and cello melody in harmonics lead into a three-voice canon in which each line keeps its own independent metric structure. The score carries an epigraph from naturalist Gerald Durrell comparing birds to "the Elizabethan lovers of the animal world." Prieto recorded it with Edison Quintana on the album Espejos (Urtext, 1997), and the score is published by Peermusic Classical; a viola-and-piano version by Omar Hernández dates from 2003.
Technical overview
Three movements, about 7–8 minutes: I. Lento flessibile ed espressivo; II. Allegro giocoso e leggiero; III. Molto lento, con tenerezza – Presto delirando. It calls for flexible, expressive slow playing, rhythmic independence against changing meters over an ostinato, a melody in harmonics, and ensemble precision in a metrically independent three-voice canon.