Biggest work since Sketches of Shetland, this is a five-movement suite of dances ancient and not-so-ancient. They are Gigue - Sarabande - Tango - Pavane - Salsa, and a more detailed description of them all can be found below. February 2021.
A short piece written for a competition in Spain, hence its Spanish flavour. Each instrument has its own melody, its own dance. First they're played on their own with interjections from the others, then after a very short burst of flamenco clapping, the dances start to come together until all are going at once, gathering momentum and becoming a whole…
This is not an Elegy at all, there’s nothing mournful or melancholic about it. The title is merely a reference to Bernstein’s solo trombone piece ‘Elegy for Mippy II’, which he wrote about his brother’s dog. Ellie is our cat, and this piece is a sort of Day in the Life, following her biorhythms and those of cats in general.…
My other Big Idea. A set of four pieces not just for trombone but trombone player. Nowadays, the music profession has so contracted that we are all often required to double on other instruments. The alto trombone has been up the player’s sleeve for centuries, but more recently, euphonium and bass trumpet are common additions. To play this piece is…
Opposing Cannon, The Dove, and Crossfire are the three movements of this short suite for ten brass. Mostly Grade VI, the last movement probably Grade VIII. See the Virtual Venue for the audio file and further details.
More of a Concert March really, and my favourite of the batch of three (see Bravo! and Viennese Marches). It's pretty much a snare drum feature, with a dynamic 'A Team'-like section followed by a wintery tune - well, it's still pretty wintery in February. This March is slightly slower, but there's an optional opportunity to pick your feet up…
Definitely Arvo Part-driven, this is a relentless piece set in D minor. Huge, lumbering trolls hurl boulders at each other in the mountains through a torrential downpour. The boulders and the rain are heavy, the rocks boom. The fight in the monsoon continues from start to finish, if anything becoming more and more thick and stormy right to the end.…
Heloisa Pinto is the actual name of the girl from Ipanema. The songwriters were sitting at a café there in the morning and she walked past, and inspired one of the world’s most famous tunes.
Here is a Hoedown, written in 2011 for the brass and percussion sections of ICO. ICO is an orchestra based in Warsaw, comprising of young musicians from seven eastern / ex-Soviet countries: Poland, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia and Moldova. For those eastern players, I wrote the most Western-like tune I could think of, a Hoedown.
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…
