I've just returned from Cardiff, where my Oboe Concerto was the set work at this year's Crowther's of Canterbury Oboe Prize, competed for by oboists from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. The original dedicatee, Celia Craig , all the way from Adelaide, Australia, was on hand to lead a woodwind residency; and we worked out that during the Concerto's 2018 UK premiere (by the BBCNOW orchestra) RWCMD's Head of Woodwind, Robert Plane , had been playing the Concerto's p

I've been mentally preparing this week for a whole evening (Friday February 13th, 7.30) of my string and piano music in Oxford's Jacqueline du Pré Music Building . It'll be a delight to work once again with the Lawson Trio , plus violist Isobel Neary-Adams.   Occasions where a concert is devoted entirely to your own music are rather rare. And it can be quite psychologically demanding, during a single evening, to follow your own musical development over multiple decades. In th

A couple of years ago, soprano Rebecca Lea asked me if I had any unrecorded songs about winter, for a new disc she was thinking about.  It so happened that I did: this was a tiny haiku collection, On White Meadows , extracted from the text of Die Wintereisse. I pinged the score over to her and thought not much more about it.   Two years later: the now double album of 21 songs by a huge range of contemporary composers, and a print songbook of all the music (most of it new, a