Description

The first movement of this piece can be found bigged-up as the first movement of Factions.  Mike Allen (Co-Principal trumpet in the RPO) and I spent a month in 1988 touring round Germany with an American Company doing West Side Story.  It was brilliant fun at that age, and we couldn’t care less that some of the venues were pretty iffy.  In Munich we did the show in a circus, and you could smell the elephant shit while you were playing.  I’d already written most of this piece, and in Munich, Mike and I went round the back to the pungent animal enclosures, stood amongst the straw and finished it there.
Also available now for Trumpet and Horn.