Alisson Kruusmaa
Five Arabesques
Short instrumentation: 0 0 0 0 - 0 0 0 0, str
Duration: 17'
Instrumentation details:
violin I (12 players)
violin II (10 players)
viola (8 players)
violoncello (6 players)
double bass (4 players)
Five Arabesques
Translation, reprints and more
Alisson Kruusmaa
Five Arabesques
Available digitally
Orchestration: for chamber orchestra
Type: Dirigierpartitur (Sonderanfertigung)
Sample pages
Work introduction
Five Arabesques (2021) for chamber orchestra is a five-movement piece inspired by the first lines of the poem “In Secret We Thirst” by German author Hermann Hesse (1877–1962): “Graceful, spiritual, with the gentleness of arabesques. Our life is similar to the existence of fairies that spin in soft cadence around nothingness, to which we sacrifice the here and now.”
“Biggest contemporary surprise of the day, at the start of a Pärnu City Orchestra concert masterminded by Estonian Festival Orchestra's violinist Mikk Murdvee in the handsome main room of the 1903 school, was Alisson Kruusmaa’s Five Arabesques for Chamber Orchestra: what an original voice, with a real sense of the numinous in the fluting dissolves of sustained string lines.” — Nice, David. 2023, August 5. theartsdesk.com
“Alisson Kruusmaa's Five Arabesques for string orchestra are much more modern than the Pärt pieces, which are based on traditional triad harmony. They skilfully alternated between soundscapes à la György Ligeti and delicate flageolets. Here the conductor Toomas Vavilov let the strings play colorful and dynamically finely differentiated.” — Vogt, Mario-Felix. 2023, August 23. Berliner Morgenpost