Black Summer Heat

String trio (also version for quartet)

14 minutes

Written for the Rothko String Trio who gave the first

performance in the Purcell Room on January 13th, 2005.

“[The Rothko string trio] illuminated the timbral recesses of Alastair Stout's Black Summer Heat so that the piece's inspiration in the paintings (appropriately enough) of Mark Rothko and the landscape of the American Mid-West was powerfully affirmed.”

The Classical Source, January 2005

Progamme note:

The inspiration for this work comes from two sources, the paintings of Mark Rothko and a visit I made to Arizona and Nevada in February of 2003. The space, textures and perspectives I saw in Rothko’s work I later encountered in the deserts and canyons of the American Southwest.

Translated into music the contrast between mountain and plateaux or juxtaposition of colour on colour becomes sound and silence, melody out of texture. The dividing lines of borders and horizons create structure. In the music, a brief pizzicato line divides the two episodes of the first movement whilst a strict double passacaglia controls the polyphony of the second movement (a mirror of the entire first movement with a ‘mirage’ of a coda.)