Chamber Music

A compilation of chamber music for viola and piano, solo piano and cello and piano.

Fantasy for Viola and Piano. Inspired by the great fantasies composed by Mozart and Schubert, although continuously played, the music proceeds in contrasting sections.

Musikalisches Opfer (eine Hommage). As the title suggests, the music is an homage to Bach, loosely based on the trio sonata from the Musical Offering. Each movement is in the same key, has the same time signature and tempo as in Bach’s original.

Aphorisms II. Many authors and thinkers have written aphorisms, but few excelled at this art. The ability to capture a complex thought in a simple, pithy phrase is harder than it looks! Recently reading through a few volumes of aphorisms by François La Rochefoucauld, Franz Kafka and Oscar Wilde, and finding that while the format of these books, in places, has some semblance of order, mostly each maxim or aphorism stands on its own. This arrangement intrigued me for music, as such a method of organization runs so contrary to how music is usually structured – and I wanted to experiment with a piece that flowed from one brief idea to another, without interruption or development.

Stanley Grill, composer | Brett Deubner, viola | Christina Gullans, cello | Allison Brewster Franzetti, piano
Recorded at Oktaven Audio, Mount Vernon, NY | Ryan Streber, producer and audio engineer