Audio

"After-Pieces - The Sphinx Unleashed"

An "Afterpiece" was a short supplementary entertainment performed after full-length plays in 18th-century England. As used here, the title implies that inchoate sense of "coming after" that informs many of my works, including "Epilogue" (1973), "Apr�slude" (1977), and "Apostille" (1994).

My four "After-Pieces" were composed in 1989-1990, exactly twenty years after my first piano cycle, the "Orphic Pieces".

In No 1, "By the clear dark fountain", a distorted fragment of the French folksong 'A la claire fontaine' (a childhood memory) is blow up out of all proportion.

"The Amorous Sphinx" explores the sphinx of the Schummanesque variety: an encoded name yields a refurrent seven-note figure. The ecstatic central section provides harmonic material for the two subsequent pieces.

The title "Passades" - subsequently lent to Roger Doyle - comes from dressage: a "passade" is the act of moving back and forth over the same ground. Of course, it can also refer to an adulterous adventure...

No 4, "The Sphinx Unleashed", is a savage toccata with echoes of Prokofiev.