Traverso

Chester Biscardi's Traverso, for flute and piano, is a duo equally balanced between both instruments. It was commissioned for the 1987 Young Artists International Flute Competitions in St. Louis and was premiered in Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall on May 8, 1988 by the First Prize Winner, Swede Göran Marcusson, with pianist Joakim Kallhed. The same musicians recorded the work in 1994. Biscardi wrote Traverso just after completing his Piano Sonata (1986); the former was based, in part, on original sketches for Piano Sonata that were never used. Both pieces were Biscardi's first works that struggled with a new way to write purely abstract, absolute instrumental music after he completed Tight-Rope (1985), an opera in nine uninterrupted scenes.
In referring to Traverso, Biscardi adds: “Although I was not given any particular guidelines as to the nature of the composition, I felt strongly that the work should be musically more challenging than a traditional virtuosic competition piece. The Italian title means 'transverse, lying across, breadth' and suggests not only the flute itself but a music which extends over diverse feelings and ideas—ideas such as 'musical landscapes.' In this work I blend a Japanese landscape, in the sense of stillness, with an open landscape, in the sense of American harmonies of the 1930's and '40's.”

(c) Jason Stell