Lazy Afternoon, retrospectively, expresses the joy of being young, on a hot day in early summer, in the beautiful school grounds near a large tree, which was surrounded by beautiful flowers. 

I wrote this arrangement of Lazy Afternoon, for cello solo with string trio and piano, especially for this recording with the Maggini String Quartet. The piano maintains its original accompaniment.

One Sunday evening in late Spring, 2015, Graeme and Penny Kay invited me to their house to talk about a commission. They asked me to write a string quartet lasting seven or eight minutes to be played at the opening of a private concert which was to be given by the Tippett String Quartet at Orford Church on November 28th 2015 in celebration of their joint 60th birthdays, the programme continuing with Janacek’s Intimate Letters, and finishing with Schubert’s Death and the Maiden.

The Oboe Quartet was written at the suggestion of the oboist Stella Dickinson, after she had heard Harriet Longman (musical saw), Jennifer Thorn (violin) and Heidi Pegler (soprano) perform my piece 'An Intake of Breath'. It was composed in June 1999. The piece is in one continuous movement and like a song or an opera is narrative-led. The narrative which the music describes is Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit. I composed it from beginning to end, turning each page of the little book as I set the words in musical rhythm to describe in musical terms Beatrix Potter’s beautiful watercolour pictures.

This Sonata for Cello and Piano was the result of a commission by Mrs. Helen Wrightson (ne´e Killick). Her daughter, Loulou Cooke, who lives in the same village as I do, had asked her mother what she would like to do in her life now that she had reached the grand age of 93 years old. Helen, who had studied the cello for a number of years at the London Violoncello School, first under Alison Dalrymple and then Herbert Walenn, replied that she would like to commission a piece of music for cello.

The Rilke String Quartet was originally written as a song-cycle for Soprano, Cello and Piano, setting in German six of Rilke’s poems on the subject of death, taken from his Book of Hours. The original title was From Rilke’s Book of Hours which is the title of the string orchestra version of this quartet.

The inspiration of the sound- world, I think, must have come from the voice of Elizabeth Schwartzkopf as the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier when I wrote it, as there are many very delicately enunciated phrases reminiscent of Schwartzkopf’s performance in the old Salzburg film conducted by Karajan. The German language, and the sense of giving up that which one loves, both permeate this quartet.