For Violin, Violoncello and Piano was completed in 1999 for the final year of my Masters degree. It was first performed at the Nelson Composers Workshop that year, where it received the Workshop prize, and later that year the work also received the main prize in the Victoria University School of Music Composition Competition. The piece follows no programmatic "storyline" but moves rather within shifting emotional sound-worlds. The opening is very "inward", and the intensity eventually builds and explodes into areas of anger or yearning, or maybe something far more subconscious and undefinable. Moments of beauty surface above the intensity, and the journey closes having come full-circle - introspective, transcendent, resigned.