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Some years ago, the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter spearheaded an effort to resurrect the Carl Flesch violin competition, which had been discontinued for some years. During that time, she asked me to write a piece for the contestants to play at the competition. Since each player would have to play the piece, presumably for an audience of some sort, it offered a particular challenge, or possibly an opportunity. There are not many performance environments when the same audience might hear in succession numerous performances of the same piece. This led me to write a set of variations, but with one important difference: after the theme was presented, it was left up to the players to "find" the best order in which the variations should be presented, or at least to create what they found to be the most convincing musical architecture. Following the theme, there are eleven variations, which means that there are 39, 916, 800 possible orderings! Some of the possibilities would be obviously unworkable, but that still left a huge number of possible sequences. Unfortunately, the competition never came together, and I didn't have the opportunity to hear a dozen or so samplings from the almost 40 million possible pathways. The performance of the piece you'll hear tonight presents my preferred sequence, though, in the spirit of the original conception, I do leave it an option to reconfigure the piece at the player's discretion.