Reflection

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) demonstrates 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, an echo of the lonely underwater world of an ondine, eventually breaking the surface at the end of the piece.”