Solo piano (2013)
Listen to an excerpt:
Written for Huw Watkins and commissioned by the ‘Wednesdays at The Forge’ concert series, the music is written in the same character as the anonymous medieval text from which it takes its name, recounting a fathers grief for his lost daughter. The third in a series of ‘Pearls’, this intimate miniature combines material of a mourning and innocent character, with the melody from Brahms’s Intermezzo Op.117 no.1 “Sleep, softly, my child”.
‘…Yea, many a thought in mind did spring, To think that her radiance in clay should rot. O mould! Thou marrest a lovely thing, My pearl, mine own, without a spot…’
Pearl (c. 14th Century – Anon.) Translation by J. R. R. Tolkien
Pearl (III) was first performed by Huw Watkins at The Forge, Camden in March 2014
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