Works: Prelude (Piano Music I) (2005)
The Prelude was commissioned in 2005 by the internationally acclaimed pianist Berenika, who also gave the world premiere on 12th May 2006 in Oxford, UK.
The single-movement work is imagined as the journey of three strangers, who meet on the road to a shared destination. Their conversation is disjointed, as all have their own obsessions and do not listen to the others. When writing this Prelude, I imagined these three - meeting on the road to Rome - to be St Paul, Achilles (from Zeno's paradox, trying to catch up with a tortoise), and Schoenberg ("the middle road is the only road that does not lead to Rome").
Broadly in a classical rondo form, the three characters are present in the music as three types of music: grand, imperial, and overbearing; calm on the surface but paranoid underneath; and frenetic, breathless, and schizophrenic.
This is the first of a work-in-progress series of Preludes for piano, each composed for a different pianist friend.
Prelude (Piano Music I) was commissioned by Berenika Zakrzewski.
Further Information / Downloads
| Premiere: | 12th May 2006, at the Holywell Music Room in Oxford, performed by Berenika. |
| Duration: | c.10 minutes |
| Instrumentation: | Piano |
| Available files: |
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| Listen: | You must first get Flash to see and use the MP3 player.
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