This piece is a coming home for me: it is ripe with melody and harmony that has lived in my brain for decades. It is built upon the stickiest of Shostakovich’s earworms, and never really tries to become anything else. I allowed it to fester and to sit. There is a sort of built-in decomposition -a winding down- of the material, and the piece thins out to a solitary voice by the end.