Dusan Bogdanovic
Doberman – Yppan: Score and separate parts (8, 4 and 6 pages respectively)
This prolific Yugoslavian composer has here written a tribute to the great American Jazz pianist/composer Bill Evans.
It is a one – movement piece split into several different sections, and begins as a Dolce 12/8 in the key of D Major, with pairs of pizzicato notes on the violin, after which the guitar ( with 6th string to D) enters with a single note melody , a mix of harmonic and ordinary notes. Then the parts swap over, and now the guitar plays its equivalent of the pizzicato violin accompaniment whilst the violin plays its own highly decorated version of the melody , its part filled with several complex groupings including 5 in the time of 3s, and 4 in the time of 3s. Then the parts swap back, and now the guitar gets the complex rhythmic version of the melody, whilst the violin now continues with its jazz – like counterpoint equally complex, resulting in a large number of places where the timing is extremely difficult , so very good players are utterly necessary here. Gradually over the next bars get more and more complex until all is fortissimo and full of imaginative lines of difficult rhythms. A Molto Rit. then brings us to a few bars of a linking melody until a new Rubato section enters, the rubato really being an excuse to make the rhythms of both players very tricky indeed! A typical example of such a moment is bar 75 where the violin has straight, quavers ,semi – quavers and a triplet of quavers for its 3 / 4 bar, whilst the guitar has two voices, the top being straight quavers and the lower one being a triplet of quavers, and the remaining two beats being a quintuplet of quavers. Then it returns to the opening Dolce section this time in A Major, where after the complex rhythms return once more, the piece suddenly dies away with a coda that completely moves away from the key of A , and finishing on a guitar arpeggio of Gb, C, F, and Bb.
Like everything this composer writes it is utterly unlike anything else you might come across, as his musical style is very much his own, but if the man’s music is something you look forward to trying, then this beautifully written work will not disappoint , as long as you have a handy violinist to play it with!
Chris Dumigan
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