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In these four piano pieces, composed in 2012, I have tried to portray William Howard and three mutual friends – the English composer Anthony Powers, The Schubert Ensemble’s Manager Ann Senior, and the Czech composer Pavel Zemek Novák. William’s portrait, which comes first, is a somewhat Chopinesque slow waltz: I have always felt that William has a special insight into Chopin’s music. Anthony Powers’s piece is a nocturnal scherzo based on a fragment of a Welsh folksong about the cuckoo (Anthony has lived near the Welsh border for many years). The portrait of Ann Senior is also an evocation of her beautiful garden in Gloucestershire. It is prefaced by a quotation from Eliot’s Burnt Norton: And the bird called, in response to The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery The bird in question is a Song Thrush, and I have included some thrush song in the piece. Lastly, Pavel Novák’s piece is based on two Moravian folksongs that he sent me some years ago, and also includes a quotation from his Fourth Symphony, which he dedicated to me.

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