Bruno Mantovani

Blue Girl With Red Wagon

The title Blue girl with red wagon alludes to a painting by the American Robert Guinan. It was on the occasion of an exhibition of this artist's work at the Villa Medici that I wrote this piece for a typically romantic formation: the piano quintet. The inspiration for this piece, however, shunned the nineteenth century, turning instead to jazz and an underlying urban atmosphere. The dilated tempo of some sections, together with the frenzy of the piano writing in the introduction or of the string quartet subsequently, creates contrasts of uncommon violence, evoking the lower depths of Chicago that Guinan bas often portrayed, for the apparent calm of the disenchanted characters dear to this artiste masks psychological tensions for which the genre of rhapsody to which my piece belongs seems an obvious metaphor.Blue girl with red wagon was commissioned by the Académie Internationale de Musique de Chambre of the Aix en Provence Festival and the Villa Medici.Bruno Mantovani