Sturm
Adam Silverman
About this work:
Composed for the Amelia Piano Trio, 17 minutes.
Composer’s note:
I studied at the Vienna Musikhochschule in 1994—95, and divided my time equally between classrooms, practice rooms, concert halls, and bars. While not practicing, studying, or attending concerts, I discovered the Austrian drink called Sturm, a young sweet wine that is served in its violent fermentation stage. This wine is ephemeral—it is available one season per year, and a bottle’s potable life lasts only a week; it may be sour and fizzy, sweet and light, or rotten and bitter depending on which day it reaches you. Sturm is cloudy because the unsettled must forms swirls in the glass. It is light yet highly alcoholic, and a Sturm hangover can be lasting.
This piano trio is not about wine. It is, however, turbulent music that moves between sweetness, bitterness, and sourness; some parts even sound fizzy. Its melodies leave trails like the swirls in Sturm; obscured motives are repeated in other voices at very short distances.
The title Sturm also refers to an 18th century artistic style called Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”), noted for very emotional expression.
This work was composed for the Amelia Piano Trio in 2001—02, with a premiere at the La Jolla Chamber Music Society’s “Discovery Series.”
PRESS QUOTE:
"The Amelia [Piano Trio's] program also included the world-premiere of a work composed for the group by the young American, Adam B. Silverman. This was a three-movement piano trio named Sturm... Silverman's program notes, an engaging farrago about Viennese wine, hangovers, "Sturm und Drang" and free tickets, along with some touching wishes and apprehensions,... provided no useful counsel as to how to listen to the music. Maybe none was needed. What I heard was thoroughly accessible, on both a sensual and structural level, and the Amelia's impassioned playing helped to make the work an exceptioanlly pleasurable one, with discernable (and sometimes ravishing) melodic motifs, a rich harmonic vocabulary, and an inebriating (there's that Viennese wine) rhythmic pulse. The music's stylistic ancestors seemed to be Fauré and Chausson on the one hand (for the textures, the harmonies, and the superbly idiomatic instrumental writing), and John Adams on the other (for the relentless drive and dynamic repetetiveness) — an odd marriage, but a successful one... Its three movements were [each] a perpetuum mobile, with ceaseless rapid triplets in the first and last movements, and ceaseless groups of four, at a slower pace, in the middle one, through which an occasional soaring lyrical phrase made its way, like a vast-winged bird over a pullulating tropical rain forest... Silverman is surely a composer to be watched."
Jonathan Saville, San Diego Reader (February 8, 2002)
The performance here is from the Amelia Piano trio at the La Jolla Chamber Music Society.
Year composed: 2002
Duration: 00:17:00
Ensemble type: Chamber or Jazz Ensemble, Without Voice:Piano Trio
Instrumentation: 1 Piano, 1 Violin, 1 Cello