Terese Pletkute - violin
Minako Satake - piano

(1)Kaip marių bangos prisilietimas (1975) / Like the Touch of a Sea Wave

Terese Pletkute - violin
Minako Satake - piano 

(2)Kaip marių bangos prisilietimas (1975) / Like the Touch of a Sea Wave

(3)Kaip marių bangos prisilietimas (1975) / Like the Touch of a Sea Wave

I began this work in 2008 but set it aside owing to the administrative pressures of my day job, meaning to return to it within a few months. In the event, it was only with lockdown in 2020 that I had the time available to continue and complete the job. The concerto was finished in manuscript short score on 22 June 2021 and orchestration of the its three movements took until 07 September. Typesetting came to a merciful end on 21 December.

Covid has meant that the programming of many orchestras, promoters and societies is years behind what had been planned; and this concerto wasn’t a commission: I wrote it because I wanted to, and it’s dedicated to my wife (not for her to play, as she isn’t a violinist). It therefore seems highly unlikely that a live performance will become possible any time soon. With that in mind, I thought I would make publicly accessible a synthetic mock-up of the score (generated by Sibelius software and its associated ‘Note Performer’ sound package), since this is a good deal better than nothing and at least good enough to afford the listener some idea of the music. 

In very broad generic terms the Concerto probably counts as an extension of the English 20th-century pastoral tradition, but it arguably steps outside that categorization in two respects: first, it is far more extensively driven by motivic counterpoint than the ‘English pastoral’ label might lead one to expect, and its themes are variants of one another, deployed in a cyclical fashion across all three movements with the intention of unifying the work as a whole. Secondly, there’s been a bit of Carl Nielsen in my bloodstream ever since I encountered his symphonies in 1973 at the age of 16, and that influence is perhaps detectable, not least in the slow introduction to the expansive first movement (a feature also of Nielsen’s own Violin Concerto) but also in odd corners of the harmonic and tonal language. So this is an English concerto with occasional Nordic undertones.

The slow movement is subtitled ‘Oltrarno’. In 1976 I spent some months living a charmed life in the city of Florence. Oltrarno is the remoter, quieter, outlying district of the city across the river from where the tourists go (Oltrarno means literally ‘beyond the Arno’). In my imagination, in Oltrarno it is always a late afternoon in autumn: odd, since I was never there at that time of year. I wanted to capture the wistfulness of the visitor looking in on the scene from without. In contrast, a moment near the middle of the movement was suggested partly by climbing the steps from the cloister in the Fra Angelico museum at San Marco, nearer the centre of the city, and by being stopped in my tracks at the top of the staircase by Angelico’s 'Annunciation'. For a time I considered naming this work ‘Florentine Concerto’, but for the time being, at least, it goes without subtitle.

The expansive first movement [Andante poco lento ma non troppo - Allegro moderato] lasts some 19 minutes. The slow movement [Andante poco lento] plays for about 11 minutes and the finale [Allegro] for nearly 12.

Violin Concerto (2020 - 21)

Symphony No. 4 'Windmills of your mind' Op. 34 (2021)

for narrator and large symphony orchestra on a poem by Boris Pasternak

Dedicated to my mother

Daria Galan, narrator

(8th February - 20th March 2021)

The complete score : https://disk.yandex.com/i/1_NlvsdOQCP0fw

It is not seemly to be famous:
Celebrity does not exalt;
There is no need to hoard your writings
And to preserve them in a vault.

To give your all-this is creation,
And not-to deafen and eclipse.
How shameful, when you have no meaning,
To be on everybody's lips!

Try not to live as a pretender,
But so to manage your affairs
That you are loved by wide expanses,
And hear the call of future years.

Leave blanks in life, not in your papers,
And do not ever hesitate
To pencil out whole chunks, whole chapters
Of your existence, of your fate.

Into obscurity retiring
Try your development to hide,
As autumn mist on early mornings
Conceals the dreaming countryside.

Another, step by step, will follow
The living imprint of your feet;
But you yourself must not distinguish
Your victory from your defeat.

And never for a single moment
Betray your credo or pretend,
But be alive — this only matters —
Alive and burning to the end.

Boris Pasternak, Summer 1956

Symphony No. 4 'Windmills of your mind' Op. 34 (2021) [Midi Sound Mockup]

le don du corps lorsque l âme est donnée.. pour grand orgue
composer Solange Labbé 

04 le don du corps orgues.m4a

Pilvine Öö (Cloudy Night) for piano

Carson Cooman, piano
Completed 06 September 2023

This is one of a series of pieces where most expressive aspects are decided by the performer. Likewise, there are no program notes; based on the title and the music, it is up to you what you wish to imagine.

Echoes from a Distant Land for piano

perf. by Ensemble für Neue Musik KunstUni Graz, 
Dirigent Edo Micic
Minoritensaal, 4th December 2014

Murmuration (2014) for large ensemble

Xenakis Evryali Powell Oxford 2016

Francis-Paul Demillac : sonate pour violon et piano en fa dièse mineur (1955)
I. Allegro vivace
[score published by Editions musicales Delatour]
Live (mono) recording from a concert at the summer festival "Flâneries Musicales de Reims" in July 1992, by Thanh-Tâm Lê (violin) and Alexandre Gasparov (piano).

Francis-Paul Demillac : sonate pour violon et piano en fa dièse mineur (Part I)

Thanh-Tâm Lê

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