Parts of this piece were inspired by certain themes in Rachmaninoff's first piano sonata, though I wouldn't presume to call it Rachmaninovian. The somewhat out-of-character coda was inspired by a story I read about Liszt. He was playing tempestuous runs in arpeggios, when he missed the top note of the run by a semitone. The person in the audience who related this story claims to have held her breath (or some such thing) in anticipation of what Liszt would do next. With a mischievous smile (or some such thing), she says, Liszt descended without pause in a run that was one semitone lower than the original (it was probably more harmonically sophisticated than that), and then played the ascending run again. To all but the most perceptive, apparently, it appeared as though Liszt had improvised in his characteristic fashion. The runs here obviously don't pretend to be Lisztian in any way, but I liked the idea of runs going up in one key, and coming down a semitone lower. Unfortunately, these runs sound vastly superior in A-flat major than they do in D major, which is what you have here, but there was no way for me to write them in A-flat major in this piece.
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Parts of this piece were inspired by certain themes in Rachmaninoff's first piano sonata, though I wouldn't presume to call it Rachmaninovian. The somewhat out-of-character coda was inspired by a story I read about Liszt. He was playing tempestuous runs in arpeggios, when he missed the top note of the run by a semitone. The person in the audience who related this story claims to have held her breath (or some such thing) in anticipation of what Liszt would do next. With a mischievous smile (or some such thing), she says, Liszt descended without pause in a run that was one semitone lower than the original (it was probably more harmonically sophisticated than that), and then played the ascending run again. To all but the most perceptive, apparently, it appeared as though Liszt had improvised in his characteristic fashion. The runs here obviously don't pretend to be Lisztian in any way, but I liked the idea of runs going up in one key, and coming down a semitone lower. Unfortunately, these runs sound vastly superior in A-flat major than they do in D major, which is what you have here, but there was no way for me to write them in A-flat major in this piece.
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