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

A Happy New Year to my website readers, and my thanks as ever for your visit here. Appropriately (and amazingly to me) this happens to be the 600th post I've put up on my site since it was set up in 2014. I'm posting somewhat less frequently these days, but I'll continue to signpost interesting events coming up, and report on unusual visits here and there.   In the next few months, the orchestral headline in my diary ( March 13th, Barbican ) is a performance of The Welcome Ar