René Staar

Parodies often play a liberating role in a composer's output: they can serve as loosening exercises between the earnest efforts of constantly searching in the "mine" for new, noble metals of musical i...

A virtuosic encore piece meant to be performed after great violin concertos, written for my fellow student and friend Rainer Küchl, who retired in the fall of 2016 after serving 45 years as concertmas...

This short piece is an elaborated concert version of one of the miniatures from the 2nd volume of the violin method with highly complex, increasing rhythms and meters.

The "duel" between two violins, which could also be staged, begins with a dispute that is musically represented by several interwoven micropolyphonic formations. Then, as in Eugene Onegin's pistol due...

Ständchen is the German word for "Serenade," which is related to the word "Stehen," which means "Standing." Therefore, I invented the word "Sitzchen," which would mean "to serenade from a sitting posi...

The experience of a “bise” (i.e. a cold wind down from Mont Blanc covering Lake Geneva with ice crystals) on a starry Christmas night became the initial impulse for this little composition. An arrange...

Vision No. 1, entitled "Cosmos," is part of a wide panorama of human ideas about the universe, life and love, set to musical sounds. The wide spectrum of dense and loose textures, and the contrast of...

Three ragtimes and a samba, hence "3R1S," are 4 miniatures from the first volume of the violin method op. 26 in a version for 3 clarinets, violin, cello and piano. They were written for two families o...

The vision of a harpsichordist playing rock music on the roof of a house in Geneva became the starting point for this short piece, a piano transcription of a movement of the 2nd Divertissement Suisse,...