This enchanting 8-minute piece for violin and piano – Oliver Knussen’s penultimate work – is made up of various kinds of musical reflection: melody reflected in its inversion; a six-note mode reflected in its complement; and the relationships between the three main parts of the piece, which are in a way varied reflections of each other. There are some reflections in water, too, the work’s opus number (31a) demonstrating a relationship to Knussen’s unfinished Cleveland Pictures : ‘The main melody began as a response to Gauguin’s painting of a Breton woman swimming’, Knussen wrote, ‘and there is also, perhaps, an echo of the lonely underwater world of an ondine, eventually breaking the surface at the end of the piece.’
| Arrangement | Piano Accompaniment, Violin, Violin and Piano |
| Genres | Post-1900 |
| Format | Part, Score and Parts |
| Level | 4 |
| Media | Book(softcover, stapled), Sheet Music |
| Publisher | Faber Music |
| Contributors | Knussen, Oliver (Composer) |
| ISBN | 9780571520565 |