University of York Music Press

Written during the composer's DAAD Residency in Berlin in the autumn 2007, the piece will be performed by the internationally acclaimed musicians, former members of the Arditti Quartet, Garth Knox and Rohan de Saram, to whom it is dedicated. In the programme note written for the world premiere, Simaku describes the complexity of the textural format of this virtuoso piece and its Berlin connection as follows:

"If I were to describe this music in one sentence, I would say that it is based on the idea of 'two things seen/heard as one'. a2 (à due) is a well-known term; it is often found in orchestral scores indicating a given passage that is to be played by two instruments of the same family. Although viola and cello could well be regarded as 'first cousins' of the string family, the literal implementation of the term a2 as a compositional 'strategy' would have been too much (!) for a piece of chamber music consisting of no more than two players. Not surprisingly, this never happens in this piece; in fact, the opposite is true: regardless of how it appears on paper (i.e. on one or two staves), the music for each instrument is constantly based on two layers. To put it differently, a music which in an orchestral context would normally be written in two separate parts and performed by two groups of instrumentalists, here it is performed by one player. This musical 'interpretation' of the title gives an indication as to how the textural format of the piece operates. But this was by no means the only thought that 'preoccupied' my mind whilst composing this work. Berlin made a profound impression on me, more so than any other place I have been to. The remnants of the wall in Bernauer Straße and the cobbled two-stone line tracing the wall across where it once stood - a clear reminder of what not so long ago there were two different worlds in one city - provoked a strikingly dramatic effect in me: border, death-strip, killing, escape to freedom... had a particularly evocative resonance, especially of the time when I lived for three years in a remote town in Southern Albania right at the border with Greece. There, there was a nameless road whose destination the authorities did not want you to know, but the locals called it the 'death-road'. In no way programmatic, in this context, the extra-musical dimension of the principal idea is very much part of the piece. Here, the musical and extra-musical interpretations cannot easily be separated - they are two parts of the same thing: a2".