Three Shepherds (1988)

Best known in this country for his weird but very successful Karmen-syuita ballet score, an arrangement for strings and percussion of music from Bizet’s Carmen, Shchedrin has worked prolifically in all forms and has found his inspiration in a wide variety of sources. His Three Shepherds for flute, oboe and clarinet – the result of a commission for the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival in 1988 – is a vividly realised memory from childhood. “Improvisation by village shepherds,” he says, “is an important Russian musical tradition… At dawn on a summer’s day, two fields and a river away, I heard distant, disjointed, and richly resonant sounds, which seemed to fill the space vertically. Different characters, different temperaments, different fates. The conversation between them is sometimes marked by cunning and sometimes by melancholy.”