Commissioned by: Nadia Lasserson for 'Piano40'
Instrumentation: Eight hands at two pianos
Duration: 11:00
Performance Details: January 2002: Purcell Room, South Bank Centre, London
Second Performance: February 2003: Purcell Room, South Bank Centre, London

Programme Notes:
“A bronze statue, 57.5 centimetres high, which represents this person. Look at it. Everything in him is stretched out, disproportionately lengthened: the arms, the legs, the body. It is a god from Etruscan mythology: he arrives before nightfall, guards the late night travellers. He is the god of the shadow of night”

Daniel Rops (from “Le diu de l’ombre du soir”)

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  • An invocation to all things Etruscan, this piece is in awe of the dark Giacometti-like shadowy figure which lay undiscovered in the ground for two thousand years, at Volterra in Tuscany, Northern Italy. dating from around 2 b.c., it’s origins are mysterious, the Etruscans being rumoured to have come from Asia Minor or even The Orient. Many surviving inscriptions are known, but the alphabet, though not dissimilar to ancient Greek, is still untranslated to this day. The small bronze figurine ‘Ombra della Sera’ (Shadow of the Evening) suggests a night-time sentinel, the shadow of some long dead inhabitant of old Etruria(Tuscany). The music attempts to capture the distant eerie echoes of this mysterious lost race from another time, as the sun slowly sets behind those Tuscan hills.