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Uri Brener

  /  Works 1991-2001   /  “AU DÉBUT ET À LA FIN” (1999) version for piano duo
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“AU DÉBUT ET À LA FIN” (1999) version for piano duo

Performances:
03.11.99 Clermont Hall, Tel-Aviv Music Academy, 03.11.99;
Conservatory of Kfar Saba, Israel (Piano duo – Raimonda Sheinfeld – Faina Eisenberg);
29.05.04 Festival Israel 2004 – “Inka” auditorium, Jerusalem (Piano duo  Sivan Silvan – Gil Garburg)

Recordings“Music for piano duo” (“New stream”, 2000)

Publications: IMC (Manuscript)

Au début et à la fin” (“At the beginning and at the end“) was composed in Dusseldorf in 1996. The work is built as a series of short movements, related both through the musical material and through the atmosphere that can be defined as pessimism, disappointment in the ideals of the materialistic world and the search for a transcendent revelation.

An appearance of a semi-quote from the “Quator pour la fin du temps” (“A Quartet for the End of Time”) by A. Messiaen is surely not a coincidence in this context. It appears at the beginning and at the end of the cycle and it is this particular structural feature that gave the work its name.

As an epigraph, work features words from the book “Ecclesiast” (1: 3-4, 1: 9-10):

“What profit has man in all his toil that he toils under the sun?
A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth endures forever…
What has been is what will be, what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
There is a thing of which [someone] will say, “See this, it is new.”
It has already been for ages which were before us..”

Transcription for two pianos was made and recorded in 1999 in Israel.

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