Street of Crocodiles

Liza LIM
Born 1966, Perth, Australia

Street of Crocodiles (1995)

flute, oboe, alto saxophone, alto trombone, cimbalom/cymbal, violin, viola, violoncello, baroque violoncello
Commissioned by Ensemble Modern
Published by Ricordi, catalogue 137227

"There open up deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are doubles, make-believe streets. One's imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps of the apparently familiar districts, maps in which streets have their proper places and usual names but are provided with new and fictitious configurations by the inexhaustible inventiveness of the night  . . . 

"On that map, made in the style of baroque panoramas, the area of the Street of Crocodiles shone with the empty whiteness that usually marks polar regions or unexplored countries of which nothing is known  . . . "

From Bruno Schultz Street of Crocodiles, translation Celina Wieniewska

The instruments of Street of Crocodiles are like the strange metamorphosing characters and scenes of Bruno Schulz' tumultuous fictional world in which the elements of nostalgia, humour, aggression and pathos collide. A baroque 'cello, in its own tuning world desperately tries to join the other stringed instruments  . . .  the violin and viola play a game of upmanship in a high-wire circus act  . . .  saxophone and alto trombone jostle, combine and split apart whilst the plaintive hungarian cymbalom remembers its gypsy origins.

Programme note © Liza LIM

First performances were 3 November 1995 at the Frankfurt Alte Oper and 5 November 1995 at the Hebbel Theater Berlin, Ensemble Modern, Ingo Metzmacher conductor.