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I have always been a fan of variations because this form allows me as a composer to combine the strongest formal unity with the sharpest emotional contrasts. In January 2019 my friend Sabine Huttel asked me to write an arrangement of a famous Russian birthday song for string quartet. I immediately fell in love with that song and decided to write variations on it. The mixture of humor, irony, sentimentality, melancholy and joy in this song seems to be typically Russian - at least as I have learned to know Russia in the novels of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, and Jerofejev. Originally I wanted to write 12 variations - but more and more ideas came into my mind, and I tried to explore all the hidden corners of that tune and find as many surprising twists as possible - jocular, playful, thoughtful, tender, yearning, in love, crazy, cheeky, desperate, coltish, triumphant. So I ended up with 16. The premiere was played by the Tokyo Recorder Ensemble at the Tokyo Recorder Festival on August 24, 2019.
