Various Artists - Winkler: Chamber Music (Piano Quintet, Cello Sonata, Light Sonatina for Piano) (2023)

It is really a pleasure to provide this introduction for my composer colleague David Winkler. David and I first began to collaborate in 2012 when he was composing the Piano Quintet with Double Bass for the Martha Argerich Project and its 2013 Festival in Lugano, SW. This CD, featuring a solo sonatina, an extended one movement cello sonata and then finally the Piano Quintet, a major work of three movements, shows great variety in melody, harmony and form. Each work is composed for a different venue, a different combination of instruments and at a different time in the composer’s developing style.
The piano quintet, represented on this CD, began to take on a unique profile for me as the role of the Double Bass became more and more prominent, more and more equal to the roles of the other string instruments in the work- violin, viola and cello. Historically, in chamber music, the Double Bass has been treated mainly as a supporting instrument with a limited melodic or thematic profile. But here, it has been quite amazing for me, as a Double Bassist, to work with the composer as he continually pushes the melodic boundaries and color ranges of my instrument, casting it as a fully equal participant within the ensemble of strings and piano. At the very outset of the first movement, after the introduction, the minor third motiv echoes in the strings, and once the Bass makes its entrance, the listener realizes that there is something “quite different here”- broader, deeper. The color spectrum is expanded. All the participant instruments are of equal weight. Perhaps this accounts for the extended, symphonic “feel” that the work possesses for me – a unique fullness and a kind of drama usually associated with larger scale ensembles. It is a great joy to participate in the development of this work, to shepherd its world premiere and to introduce its first recording. After the Lugano premiere my colleague Martha Argerich remarked “what a beautiful work and what an amazing composer” and in my opinion, “David Winkler is one of the greatest composers of our time whose style possesses unique characteristics”.

All of the works represented on this CD were composed at important moments in my stylistic development. The Cello Sonata is the oldest of them, from 2010 and was created at the request of Cellist Andrey Tchekmazov, who is featured on this disc. The sonata is a twenty minute, one movement work with continuous melodic development and where the contrasting “movements” are contained within a single form.
Light Sonatina (2020), commissioned by pianist Gabriele Baldocci, is a six minute work, composed during the Beethoven 250th Anniversary year as a tribute to the great master. The work “suggests” certain of Beethoven’s well known motivic and stylistic traits for the piano, but within a completely original context. The “Light Sonatina” title is a play on words and harkens back to Beethoven’s “Leichte Sonata” group, while in this case, in miniature form.
The Piano Quintet with Double Bass, commissioned by the Martha Argerich Festival (Lugano, SW), was completed and premiered in 2013. The original performers in the Lugano premiere include an outstanding group of artists: Gabriele Baldocci pianist, Michael Guttman violinist, Lyda Chen viola, Jing Zhao cello and Enrico Fagone Double Bass.
The work contains three distinct movements and lasts over 32 minutes. In discussing the kind of work to write, the Festival mentioned to me that Schubert’s Trout Quintet was to be a featured work at the Festival in 2013. This gave me the idea of writing a work for the same instrumentation as the Trout, that could be featured on the same program as the Trout – while being wholly contemporary in character. In this work, as in all of my recent work, the “story”, the “narrative” in the music comes about through its thematic profile and the ongoing development of “line”. It is these extended thematic subjects, their associations and counterpoint which produce the work’s architecture and its particular harmonic and vertical dimensions.