Teoponte – a guerrilla campaign that in 1970 was the home-bred response to the more famous, but equally unsuccessful one led by Che Guevara three years earlier – is a recurrent theme in my work. It has been the subject for an opera (London International Opera Festival, 1988), a string quartet (Koussevitzky Commission, 2012) and this piece for double bass and piano. The piece recasts the opera’s four-section structure based on an expansion of a chord sequence common in Andean folk music.
The piece was written for James Rapport, who alongside pianist Eduard Lanner gave the first performance at Festsaal, Diplomatische Akademie, in Vienna in 2011.
