Скачать или смотреть Raymond Deane: Vayu Vata, for piano quartet

Premiere performance, 13 January 2022, Gl. Holte Kirke, Copenhagen.
Rudersdal Chamber Players - Christine Pryn (vn), Isabelle Bania (va), John Ehde (vc), Manuel Esperilla (pf)

Dedicated to Christine Pryn, who commissioned it with funding from the Irish Arts Council/An chomhairle ealaíon. It was commissioned for a concert series concerned with the four elements in their positive (creative) and negative (destructive) aspects. Given that my element was "air", the title seemed appropriate - in Zoroastrianism, Vayu-Vata is a dual deity of the air, angelic and demonic depending on circumstances. The piece is a meditation on 4 quotations relating at least partly to "air":

Apocalypse (Revelations) Chapter IX, verses 1-2:

And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.
And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace;
and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.

F. S. Flint (1885 – 1960): Lament

The young men of the world...
...no longer breathe freely:
The genius of the air
Has contrived a new terror
That rends them to pieces.

Paul Celan (1920-1970): Todesfuge/Death Fugue

...dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft
dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da liegt man nicht eng

...then you rise as smoke into the air
then you've a grave in the clouds where you don't lie too close

Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968): Antico iverno / Ancient Winter

così le parole.
Un po' di sole, una raggiera d'angelo,
e poi la nebbia; e gli alberi,
e noi fatti d'aria al mattino.

thus words.
A little sun, an angel's halo,
and then the mist; and the trees,
and ourselves made of air in the morning.

Thanks are due to Jonathan Ofir, who filmed this performance.