All the works featured here were written for Duo MARES.

° World-première recording
• Commissioned by Performing Arts Fund NL

Chiel Meijering was born in Amsterdam in 1954 and studied at the Amsterdam Conservatory of Music, where his teachers included Ton de Leeuw (composition) and Jan Labordus and Jan Pustjens (percussion). He also studied the piano there. – “I find that chamber music is the best medium for an intimate dialogue,” he explains. “Large orchestras are increasingly associated with institutions and power, whereas chamber music belongs to a small, complicit and intelligent group of listeners, an audience that cultivates an educated tone and identifies with the rules of modern art. In this way the artist himself can determine the rules of musical discourse. He has certain predilections and limitations, and these alone define his style.” In Amber and Cream, which Chiel Meijering wrote in 2007, expressive passages keep alternating with rhythmic, dynamic lines, leading to an increase in textural density and tension. Both harmonically and melodically, Chiel Meijering has sought to write a modal work, recalling the tradition of the Turkish makam, and yet the principal infl uences on him are Debussy and Messiaen. He writes specifically for the performers who are to give the work’s first performance, and this was also true of Amber and Cream, which he wrote for Duo MARES. Th is work, he explains, “is like a journey, at the end of which you return to your starting point. But by the time you return you are a diff erent person. Th e end and the beginning are the same, but because of all that has happened in the meantime the music that you hear at the end sounds different from what it sounded like at the beginning. You feel to be ‘at home’: after all the storms and inner struggles everything achieves a state of rest. In many registers the sound of the viola comes so close to that of the accordion that they overlap, like the two colours of the title, amber and cream – a beautiful, shining patina for the musical texture.”

Ivo Petric was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 1931 and studied composition and conducting at the Ljubljana Academy of Music. He has been artistic director of the “Slavko Osterc” Ensemble, editor-in-chief of Edicije DSS, a journal devoted to contemporary Slovenian music, and the artistic director of the Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra. – “More recently the viola has come to occupy the forefront of my attention. Apart from my early Variations on a Theme by Béla Bartók for viola and piano, which dates from 1954, I have written three pieces for the viola, all of them very important to me: the Duo concertante for viola and accordion, the Sonata fantasiana for viola solo and the Fantasia concertante for viola and chamber orchestra. All of these pieces sprang from my friendship with outstanding soloists, including Duo MARES, to whom I dedicated my Duo concertante in 2006. Th is was the first time I had written for the accordion, and Marko was a great help in advising me on how to write for his instrument. From a formal point of view, this is an example of free composition in which significant intervals are used on frequent occasions, providing the thematic material for the often polyphonic combination of these two particular instruments” (Petric). In 2008 Ivo Petric also wrote Carinthian Variations II for accordion solo for Marko Kassl.

Sinta Wullur was born in Bandung, Indone- sia, in 1958 but moved to the Netherlands ten years later. She studied at the Sweelinck Conservatory of Music in Amsterdam, where her teachers included Willem Brons (piano) and Ton de Leeuw (composition), later studying with Th eo Loevendie and Louis Andriessen at the Royal Conservatory in Th e Hague. At both institutions she also worked with Gilius van Bergeijk and Jan Boerman in their studio for electronic music, while additionally developing an interest in Indonesian and Asiatic music and studying the gamelan and singing with teachers in Bali and Java. – Her compositions bring together western and eastern traditions. Works written for western forces invariably refl ect the influence of the gamelan in the form of their rhythms, textures and scales and their use of specific modes. And whenever she writes for gamelan ensembles, Sinta Wullur uses the textures and stylistic principles of western and contemporary music. Composed in 2009, Moods and Modes was inspired by a visit to India that she undertook in 2008 in order to further her vocal studies. Indian music is famously based on the raga, which is, however, more than just a mode. In addition to being a particular scale on which the music is based, the sequence of pitches and intervals is also relevant as these determine the type of raga. Moreover, the atmosphere of the piece is dictated by the mode. Th e moods depicted in Moods and Modes, which uses Indian elements alongside others borrowed from Javanese singing, are anger, grief and aggression.