For saxophone, accordion, double bass, piano and orchestra
Written for POING, Sanae Yoshida and The Norwegian Radio Orchestra and conductor Ilan Volkov.
The mooon has set, dogs are sleeping consists of quotations and reworkings of early works by Frédéric Chopin—particularly shaped by inspiration from Polish folk music—and exists somewhere between the gleaming concert hall and the worn-out salon. I have attempted to strip his material of pomp, splendor, brilliance, and romantic affectations, allowing the grand and virtuosic to collapse into fragile, private, and practice-room-like situations, where the music gets distracted, even stuck, and is overtaken by ever-new impulses and digressions, or simply lets go and lingers, resonating in a state of worn-out stillness.
The soloists (piano, saxophone, accordion, and double bass) function as a single, unified entity, like one worn and out-of-tune instrument, handled by four musicians who never quite manage to find a secure position. They hesitate to come to the fore, and drift within a pastoral haze of simple melodies and naïve major triads, often drowned out by an orchestra that never quite plays along, but gradually collapses in its attempt to accommodate the soloists’ introverted temperament.
The work received 3rd place in The International Rostrum of Composers 2026.
