During 2020 and 2021, David Palmer wrote his first To a Skylark, a setting of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem of the same name. Scored for mezzo-soprano, flute, and cello, the vocal setting often deconstructs the individual syllables of each word, much in the manner of Luciano Berio. The effect of this is to blend more closely the sounds of the instruments with the voice.

Tonight, we will hear the world premiere of a second piece which ‘shares its name’ with this trio (Palmer thus avoids describing it as a recomposition or arrangement of the first work). Both pieces have a texture that is often pointillistic: isolated notes burst out, triggering a prolongation or echo elsewhere in the ensemble. In fact, this sort of call-and-response is crucial to the ensemble work. Palmer describes two types of material as underlying the music: monophonic passages in which the strings outline a concise, intense gesture which is then followed by a single line in the piano; and sections for the full ensemble, often densely written with close but not identical rhythms that therefore blur the texture. The piece makes extensive use of air noises in the wind instruments and similar unpitched sounds in the strings, which recall human breath; meanwhile, fast flourishes suggest bird calls.

​

Joshua Ballance