Karim Al-Zand: "Cabinet of Curiosities" trns. for viola and piano | Duo Impetuoso

Molly Wise, viola | James Palmer, piano
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Recorded live in performance in Duncan Recital Hall at the Shepherd School of Music, Rice University. Video produced by Caio Alves Diniz.
I first heard Cabinet of Curiosities in January 2024 when I was backstage for a Musiqa Houston concert. As with any intriguing piece for clarinet and piano, my ears perked up to see if I might make a viola version work. With the blessing of Dr. Karim Al-Zand, Houston-based composer and professor at Rice University, I transcribed the work-originally for clarinet and piano-for James and myself to play. Al-Zand defines a cabinet of curiosities as “an elaborate cupboard used as a repository of diverse and exotic objects.” Collecting small, rare, intriguing items was a popular pastime of the wealthy in 16th- and 17th-century Europe. Al-Zand’s composition is a sort of musical cabinet of curiosities, each movement holding a magnifying glass up to a different peculiar, wonderful specimen. In the first movement, still life with lizard, Al-Zand contrasts slow-moving chords with the scurrying thirty-second notes of a lizard; I decided to add sul ponticello to this idea. The second movement, saltarello al rovescio, is a musical palindrome - after the viola’s cadenza halfway through, all of the notes and rhythms are played in reverse, verbatim. The third movement, early one morning in a convex mirror, is a slow, dream-like setting of an English folksong “Early one morning.” The fourth movement, sarabande selon règle de l’octave, is an asymmetrical sarabande in 5/8 meter that simultaneously honors and parodies the “rule of the octave,” an early Baroque method of harmonizing ascending and descending scales. Movement five, love letter, is performed by solo viola. I like to imagine different stories, emotions, and proclamations as I play each phrase, so that no two performances are the same. The piece concludes with divisions on a Bulgarian rhythm, which features increasingly-exciting variations on the 11-beat kopanitsa rhythm.
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