Fast Music (1994)

Cello solo – 10 mins.

Video

Audio

Score (Free Download)

Program Note

Don Freund’s Fast Music (1994) was composed to exploit the cello wizardry of Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi.  It is approximately 10 minutes of solo cello virtuosity which flies, propels, drives, flashes, chugs, blurs, and rocks. These different kinds of fastness appear and reappear in a sort of exponential rondo: the opening fastness — fleet, breezy, and amiable — returns often enough to spread a benign whimsy over the proceedings, but not without being challenged by other fastnesses which are rougher, threatening, rambunctious, even frenzied. Close to the end, a theme with an almost Straussian heroic character appears to rescue the piece from its more diabolical tendencies, and usher in the final fling of the opening fastness.