Stretto Perpetuo

“This is the great necessary metaphysics of music in our time – to alter the warp and woof of time’s fabric. To do so happens through the adoption of new mechanisms of attention: the severe, the heroic, the excession.  Like The Hunt by Night, Stretto Perpetuo follows the heroic tendency of the Modern, inherited from the Romantic but now more jagged and intense; the duo here is almost combative.  The performers fly along plateaus of order and disorder with the speed of the nomadic war-machine with its twists and turns, violent acceleration, and endless motion.  “The water point is reached only in order to be left behind. Every point is a relay and exists only as a relay.” (Deleuze & Guattari, Mille plateaux).  

This dynamism resonates with Uccello’s hunt in which order and disorder are entwined: evenly distributed tree-trunks, the cathedral-like foliage framing the bustle of anticipations. “The slim dogs go / Wild with suspense / Leaping to left and right, Their cries receding to a point” as Mahon describes it.  Here the partnership of cello and piano collapses and returns, as do the packs of dogs amongst the trees, colliding, rushing, underfoot and under hoof, slowing the chase as much as speeding it along. “

-from the album booklet
for The Hunt By Night,
New Focus Recordings.