PORTRAIT pour orchestre（2024）

I composed my orchestral work Portrait under the inspiration one of my favourite novels, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The novel depicts the way in which a person’s thoughts, character and the path along which they are led are subject to the influence of their environment and the people in their vicinity. I was first captivated by Anna Karenina when still in my teens and renewed my acquaintance with this fictitious character on many occasions thereafter. In this work I attempt not to give a musical commentary on the novel as a whole but rather to present a ‘portrait’ of Anna, its protagonist and heroine.
Structured in a deformed version of sonata form, the work begins with a three-note motif played by the flute and representing Anna and the loneliness she is experiencing in her everyday life. This motif appears in various transformations throughout the work, reflecting the vicissitudes of her emotions. The first theme represents the darkness in Anna’s mind that results from her sense of being treated coldly on a routine basis. This theme appears to a muddy harmonic backdrop. The second tonal and contrasting theme depicts the passionate romantic feelings of Anna and her lover, Vronsky. The development section reflects Anna’s wavering emotions. The recapitulation then focuses on Anna, now physically and mentally distraught, and her obsessive love for Vronsky. A melody evoking Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin, which partially adheres to the same story, is suggested in the development section. The recapitulation is a frenzied dance consisting of melodic material presented earlier in the work. Alban Berg incorporated various instrumental forms into his two operas, but what I have done conversely is to incorporate operatic features such as an overture, an aria and a duet into the present instrumental work along with a waltz, a scherzo and a frenzied dance, the whole being bound together through the agency of sonata form.