Quintets

The Pripet Marshes is a winner of the 2003 Marmor Composition Award. The purpose of this competition is to encourage the composition of "inventive, and playable" chamber music featuring the clarinet. The Pripet Marshes is a rhapsody for clarinet quintet (clarinet plus string quartet, or for clarinet plus string orchestra). It was inspired by the poem, The Pripet Marshes by Irving Feldman. This haunting poem describes how the narrator might put himself in the shoes of an omnipotent power, and transplant his friends to a Jewish village in the northwest Ukraine during World War II. Each person is a unique character with a human charm and frailties. Then he would snatch the village back to safety before the arrival of the Nazis. While the music does not try to mirror the story--this is not programmatic music--it does try to reflect the mood of the poem. Jewish-style melodies sweep through the piece with a whisper of Klezmer.