“The next witness was the Duchess’s cook. She carried the pepper-box in her hand, and Alice guessed who it was, even before she got into the court, by the way the people near the door began sneezing all at once.”
— Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
…before she got into the court… (2017) is a 17-minute concerto for solo violin and chamber orchestra. Its title and epigraph, taken from Alice in Wonderland, fix the music in a moment of expectancy—“before” the commotion, when the air is tense and everyone seems to be holding their breath. The score opens in the softest dynamic, with sustained, carefully balanced lines, while the solo violin speaks in a hushed, tenuto, non-vibrato voice. Across the piece, color is shaped by glissandi that swell briefly before settling back to quiet, by con sordino strings and winds, sul IV writing for the soloist, and muted brass (including bucket mute) that shade the harmony from within.
Percussion enters as a kind of punctuation rather than driving pulse: marimba and vibraphone blend with the strings; chimes (played with hard mallets and released after each strike) mark turning points; and a late, unmistakable opera gong with slow glissando sounds like a threshold being crossed. After long spans of restraint, the music gathers into forceful tutti outbursts—brief, concentrated peaks—before it recedes again into a more rarefied register.
An unusual, theatrical turn occurs in the third major section: one of the orchestra’s violinists stands and joins the soloist at the front of the stage. The two launch into a virtuosic, rapid-fire dialogue, their lines weaving in and out of each other in close proximity. This playful confrontation briefly dissolves the traditional boundary between soloist and ensemble, turning the spotlight into a shared, charged exchange before the focus returns to the full group.
The concerto remains virtuosic in its demands but resists display for its own sake: the solo line is woven through the ensemble, often as a color among colors, so that presence and distance continually trade places—like a figure glimpsed just before entering the court.