Bradley Hawkins is a Cellist and Composer living in Seattle, USA. He has composed music for stage, screen, video games, commercials, dance, and diverse ensembles from orchestras and choirs to avant-garde ensembles and rock bands. He has performed as soloist, in orchestras, rock groups, and many chamber ensembles including serving as founding member and Artistic Director of the Seattle New Music Ensemble. He taught cello and bass at Seattle University and at Lakeside School and has an active mentoring and teaching life. Lesleigh Walters has more than 20 years experience accompanying vocalists and instrumentalists, as well as working with young children and adolescents. She maintains a full piano teaching studio and also teaches weekly band classes at University Cooperative School. Ms. Walters studied piano at Florida State University's School of Music under Leonard Mastrogiacomo and currently takes lessons with Mark Salman. Adam Haws is a composer in the Seattle area. He has written chamber, orchestral, and vocal music, as well as a great deal of electroacoustic and ambient music, and has degrees in Composition from Western Washington University and the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. He enjoyed a long association interning with Seattle Opera’s education department and lecturing high school students on the minutia of Wagner’s Ring cycle. Some of his music is influenced by Ockeghem, but some of it isn't. In his spare time, Adam enjoys films, hiking, and playing with his rambunctious cats. His spirit animal is the humble cuckoo. 1. Adam Haws: Dança 2. Shostakovich First Movement: Allegro non troppo 3. Shostakovich Second Movement: Scherzo 4. Shostakovich Third Movement: Largo 5. Shostakovich Fourth Movement: Allegro 6. Liszt Elegie No. 1 7. Liszt Elegie No. 2 8. Schubert First Movement All pieces were recorded in November, 2015 at Dialekt Recordings in Seattle Washington. Bradley Hawkins served as engineer and editor. Performers: Lesleigh Walters: Piano Bradley Hawkins: Cello Adam Haws was present and offered important help on Dança. Album photo by Rachel Morton. Dança (2015) is based on the Afro-Cuban clave rhythm, with its inherent metric ambiguity. The melodic and harmonic material, however, is more mysterious and sinister than its rhythmic basis might suggest. Dimitri Shostakovich wrote his Cello Sonata, Op. 40 in 1934 after production of his opera “Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk District" and during an affair that caused a divorce from his wife. The piece was premiered on Christmas Day, 1934, with the composer at the piano and Viktor Kubatsky on cello. The piece is written in 4 movements, I. Allegro non Troppo, II. Allegro (Scherzo), III. Largo, and IV. Allegro. The first movement is lush and expansive, the second movement driving and sinister, the third, contemplative and warm, and the fourth, dark yet virtuosic. Grows on you. Franz Liszt wrote two Elegies, the first in 1874 and the second in 1877. Both are written for piano and solo string instrument, typically violin or cello. They are both of a somber yet emotionally complex style owing to the broad harmonic wanderings and motivic melodic development. In laymen’s terms, this means that he was willing to turn the key signature upside down in order to suit his harmonic aims, sometimes changing key in the middle of a phrase. The chordal relations are what we now know as chromatic mediant relations often used in film music by such composers are Danny Elfman and in the jazz music of John Coltrane. Far distant tonal centers are often linked by the one note they have in common and when elicited, provide the bridge between far away musical lands. Motivic melodic development in this case means that the small kernel of a theme is transformed or set in varying surroundings with each iteration. They grow on you. Franz Schubert wrote the “Arpeggione” Sonata in 1824 at the age of 27. The piece was only published in 1871, long after Schubert’s death. The Arpeggione is a small cello with 6 strings that is played with a bow and was invented in just the prior year. The tuning is that of a guitar - E,A,D,G,B,E - and plays in the same range. The fingerboard features frets like a guitar but with a rounded bridge so as to allow use of the bow. The arpeggione is a transposing instrument that reads in treble clef but sounds an octave lower. The piece is wildly virtuosic yet contains singable, hummable lines that have made the piece a cornerstone of the cello literature. The piano part is equally virtuosic but also features the polka style textures and chord voicings that mark Schubert’s mature style. To put it in context, the theremin has had a much longer artistic life than the arpeggione. This was the piece that brought the Hawkins Walters Duo together and therefore completes the album.