violin
Autriche, Vienne, Konzerthaus, Thomas Kakuska Memorial Concert
Irvine Arditti.
In Memoriam Thomas Kakuska was written in the Summer of 2006 as a tribute to our dear friend Tommy as he was known to his friends. For those who did not know him, he was the viola player with the Alban Berg Quartet for almost two decades. I had the chance to get to know him better in the mid 90s when he and cellist Valentin Erben collaborated with the Arditti Quartet on a string sextet project in 1996.
The opening of the piece is built on short contrasting ideas that grow and develop to shape longer sections of the piece and ultimately the structure of the work as a whole.
When I started working on the piece I wanted to portray Tommy’s cheerful spirit and I did this by means of working on short contrasting motivic ideas. But I also wanted to express his profoundly melancholic soul, which I try to portray harmonically, mostly explored in the last section of the piece.
Tommy has been sorely missed since we lost him on July 2005 and will always be in my mind as a rather exceptional friend and musician.
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