String Trio (1996)

Allegro

Variations: animato - allegretto - andante - allegro con spirito - moderato - poco animato

The career of James Francis Brown - who started composition studies with Hans Heimler at the age of 11 and went on to the Royal Academy of Music in the 1980s - is poised to take off in a big way. As the recipient of a generously funded five-year NESTA Fellowship, he has recently been able to free himself from the teaching duties which, he felt, got in the way of working on the commissions which have been coming his way with increasing frequency. “My main aim, he says, “is to create a big, magical, generous theatre piece for a wide audience.”

The String Trio, which was first performed by the Leopold String Trio at the Deal Festival in 1996, is in two movements. “The first of them,” he says, “is, loosely speaking, in sonata form, with strongly contrasting subjects. Two main ideas dominate this movement. The first is quick and vigorous, whilst the second is more reflective and rhythmically free.

“The second movement is a set of six variations. They are all strongly marked from each other in terms of tempo and figuration, and whilst the first and last variations are perhaps optimistic in tone, the central variations, in particular the fourth, represent the darker aspects of the material. Beethoven's String Trio in C minor Op 9 No 3 with its grim energy and fantastic yet sombre colours was a powerful influence here, and I could not resist taking possession of a fragment from the first movement which seemed so akin in spirit to my own music at this point.”