This enchanting 8-minute piece for violin and piano – Oliver Knussen’s penultimate work – is made up of various kinds of musical reflection: melody reflected in its inversion; a six-note mode reflected in its complement; and the relationships between the three main parts of the piece which are in a way varied reflections of each other. There are some reflections in water too the work’s opus number (31a) demonstrating a relationship to Knussen’s unfinished Cleveland Pictures: ‘The main melody began as a response to Gauguin’s painting of a Breton woman swimming’ Knussen wrote ‘and there is also perhaps anecho of the lonely underwater world of an ondine eventually breaking the surface at the end of the piece.’
