Walter Winslow

Four Violins, Viola, and Cello

"Winslow's last completed work, Concertati Veneziani (1996), is a masterpiece. The sextet is scored for four violins, viola and cello with the violins usually playing in pairs, giving the work the feel of a string quartet.
The composer noted, "I felt a need to honor the musical tradition which has made my life rich beyond measure. Thus the need to sum up, the need to speak in a somewhat broader language.... All this occurs in a musical language that treats tonality (diatonic and chromatic), modality, atonality and dodecaphony as if they were all inhabitants of the same universe."
"It's enough to say that Winslow succeeds in achieving this goal. The sense of the past pervades the music, but the sextet never falls into the trap of becoming a pastiche. The work ends in a chorale of sublime beauty evocative of Palestrina and late Beethoven." -Patricia F. Brown