From a Distance is a song with which Bette Midler landed a world hit in 1990. Hope, that's the message that can be heard from the lines and the music. The song was written back in 1985 by Julie Gold, a singer-songwriter who was not active in the music business until then. I can remember the song very well, however, it then fell into oblivion for me over decades. Corona, the almost non-existent opportunities to make music or perform, to keep distance, even from close friends and family, the everlasting hope that all this will be possible again someday, brought the song back to my memory again. What Julie has written there is so musically expressive in my eyes that the song also works purely instrumental.

The arrangement builds slowly, it only increases towards the end, also in volume. The melody sounds in the individual voices, so it is each (r) for itself and yet somehow all together. This is a feeling that we musicians know well enough since Corona... Julie's hope is musically found in the arrangement: If the main melody is at first rhythmically always interrupted with pauses, it overcomes them at the end and sounds in the full movement without the set pauses - the distance is overcome. In the text this happens a little differently, here it is partly overcome by words like hope, harmony, love and God, in the arrangement this part flows without pause signs into the radiant forte and then loses itself in a staggered interplay of all voices towards the end.

In the arrangement I stayed very close to the piano original; in my eyes it contained so much that in the end I "only" had to distribute it among the voices, my so much missing three fellow musicians of the quartet in mind. (Undine Engel)