Sideways Air on a Black Hole, Konzertstück for Clarinet in Sib

The composer writes the following about this work: 'As if we could only walk sideways in a tilted force field, Petruska-Harlequin in my piece evokes waltz fragments on a capsized 'Titanic', or Berlioz's Romeo und Juliet. Vertiginous chromatic martellato-staccato sequences keep tearing apart the clarinet's virtuosic aerial gymnastics interspersed among the fragments and half-heard wisps of sound. We suddenly find ourselves now in the depths, now in the highest regions, sidelong, as if all these fragments of musical memories were dancing on the edge of the event-horizon of a black hole...' This work, dedicated to the clarinettist Csaba Klenyán, was composed in 2002 inSaskatoon (Canada).