Kenbu Sansō for Piano Trio（2020）

From around the start of the Covid epidemic I found myself gravitating towards a style making positive use of harmonious materials. After a period of experimentation，this piano trio was the first work that I created in this style. The violinist and cellist who premiered the work were both specialists in this genre and the concert at which it was presented was a dense one featuring key works from the genre. I began thinking about how the rising excitement felt by the performers might be conveyed into an almost ecstatic realm and suddenly conjured up the idea of a sword dance.
I recall once attending a solemn ceremony in Aizu Wakamatsu in Fukushima Prefecture featuring a sword dance characterised by the contrast between stasis and latent dynamism. Backed up as it was by historical fact，the dance generated a sense of high drama. Of course I have made no attempt in this piece to depict this sword dance literally，but the tense atmosphere and internalised excitement that were features of the dance inspired my creativity as I worked on the piece.
The piano trio as a genre includes many comparatively large-scale works，and the length of this piece was determined by my feeling that there was room for a piece that could fit into a piano trio recital as an encore or in between major works in the repertoire. When we came to actually perform the piece there was a sense of density that seemed to condense time in a manner that had something in common with the tense atmosphere of the sword dance.
The title of the piece is a neologism of my own invention denoting a trio (sansō) consisting of a musical dance performed as part of an imaginary ceremony dedicated to something in the distant past (kenbu).
I have performed this piece with many different players since the premiere，and on each occasion the performance has generated a sense of intense，compacted time.