Programme notes This four-movement concert or ballet suite for solo piano, completed in 1995, was inspired by a magical chapter from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.  In a scene far removed from the antics of Mr Toad, two of the animal characters journey through a summer night to the breaking of dawn, drawn on irresistibly by a mysterious glad piping to a vision of Pan,  protector of all wild creatures. Prelude evokes twilight, punctuated by two small scherzo episodes for fluttering moths and wheeling bats; Nocturne paints the river as the moon gradually rises and sails overhead; Caprice brings first light, hints of a morning breeze, and the mysterious piping.  The Finale blends the whispers of the wind in the reeds and Pan’s secret song to all creatures.

Programme notes This collection was composed in 1995, in response to a request from piano teacher Eleanor Drover for a set of children’s piano pieces which are poetic and sensitive in character.  Each of the six pieces tells a story about some aspect of Light and how it affects our world.  Eleanor and I started from the shared feeling that sensitivity and awareness developed in the young are a means by which violence can end.
    This music was not written to lie under simple five-note patterns, but to develop intelligence and suppleness in the fingers, hands and arms, exploring all registers of the piano.

These two pieces were commissioned by Cordelia Williams, who premi?red the first of them at her eighth birthday piano recital on 7 July 1996.  I was asked if I could reassure Cordelia by reconciling through music the tragic story of Shakespeare’s Cordelia.  In this respect, Cordelia for whom the Angels Dance is not a tragic or sad piece: it is a dance for Shakespeare’s pure-hearted Cordelia, and for the young artist who commissioned the piece.  Underneath some decorative passages in small notes, this piece is melodic, not unlike calligraphic curves which must flow and be connected.
     Blue stars are the youngest and hottest of the stars in the universe.  On attending an exhibition of astronomical photography, I felt a connection between the brightness and energy of the blue stars and the talented young Cordelia Williams.  The Blue Star is also a study in pedal, indicated by tying bass notes, sometimes with open ties, rather than by constantly indicating ‘Ped.’.  This leaves more to the player’s initiative, and allows for different pianos and acoustics.  It also lets the score show harmonic mixing of sounds more clearly.

Trees & Lightning begins with an approaching storm over a national park, the heavy and intense stillness of the air contained by the suppressed  dynamics of the opening bars against which there are bursts of lightning and brooding thunder. This eases forward into the central waltz where the artistic perspective alters to below the tree-line. Here one is looking up at the trees (gums, eucalyptus etc.) whose white limbs are transformed in the lightning to reveal them moving in a fantastic dance.

Trees & Lightning was commissioned and premiered by American pianist Scott McCarrey on November 15, 2007 in the McKay auditorium, Brigham Young University, Hawaii.