Starsail
by Kevin Lau
- Instrumentation
- Cello, Piano
- Composed
- 2008
- Duration
- 14'
- Publisher
- Canadian Music Centre (unpublished, printed by CMC), RSN 67002, call no. MI 3213 L36st
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About this piece
Kevin Lau, a Toronto composer born in 1982 who was later the Toronto Symphony Orchestra's affiliate composer, wrote Starsail in 2008, and it won the University of Toronto's Karen Kieser Prize in 2010. His note describes an image of a ship sailing on a clear night so that, seen from above, it seems to glide on a sea of stars: the cellist leaves a Romantic 'home' theme for increasingly strange territory, and that theme keeps returning as a refrain. Sarah Steeves and Lauretta Altman gave the premiere at Redpath Hall, McGill University, on 19 March 2008, and cellist Rachel Mercer, who later premiered Lau's cello concerto Foundation, has recorded it twice.
Technical overview
Opens in tenor clef in shifting meters (3/8, 7/16, 6/8) at dotted quarter = 54 and runs through faster sections up to dotted quarter = 95, a frantic con fuoco passage and a free quasi-cadenza before a calm close. The cello part uses bass, tenor and treble clef, chords and double stops, fast triplet arpeggios across the strings, repeated sixteenth-note chords, and harmonics on the A string in the final bars, ending ppp morendo.