Cyprus Wedding Song

World Premiere: 18. May 2019, Brixworth Music Festival

My “Cyprus Wedding Song” is a gift to both a married couple and to a new piano that was kindly donated to the Brixworth Music Festival by the wife of this couple. The husband – who is sadly no longer with us – came from the Greek part of Cyprus, and it seemed appropriate to write a love song for these two generous people.

I found this “Cyprus Wedding Song” in a book of folk songs from around the world. Apparently it is very well known in Cyprus.

I wanted to write a piece that would “show off” the capabilities of the new Kawai grand piano, but I didn’t want to just write an arrangement of the wedding song. I wanted the piece to be both a compositional challenge to myself and a technical challenge to the brilliant, Russian born pianist, Oksana King, who will be giving the first performance at the Brixworth Music Festival 2019. I have used both “modern” and traditional techniques, so that the listener will sometimes be confused by an atonal style, and then sometimes “brought down to earth” with familiar, tonal runs and arpeggios that really belong to the piano literature of the Classic and Romantic. Perhaps, programmatically, one might imagine the following: Chaos during the wedding preparations: bells ringing, people rushing around, maybe stuff getting lost or broken. An occasional “breather” in between to sort things out – a couple of sentimental romantic moments – only to be disrupted again by complete chaos. But in the end, everyone settles down to a happy Cypriot wedding. (Vivienne Olive)