Today I am delighted to share with you the world premiere performance of my work Dreams for violin and piano ahead of this being released publicly!

This work came about through my connection with the violinist Maja Horvat. Having come into contact with her originally a number of years ago after curating a concert at The Royal College of Music for Illuminate Women’s music–  her string quartet – the Brompton string quartet went on to perform my string quartet Eye o da hurricane in a number of performances. Indeed the Brompton quartet went on to perform a number of Illuminate concerts as well, including giving the UK premiere of my work Falling watercolours.

The vitality, expressive range and drama of her playing completely drew me in as a listener and astonished me as a composer, to think of all the possibilities with a performer, a musician like this. Maja also found my writing for violin natural lent itself to her idiosyncraties as a player, allowing her to flourish. Soon we began talking about her performing one of my solo works for violin and perhaps even a new piece. It was at the tail end of 2023 that we managed to gain funding from the Marchus Trust to allow me to begin work on a substantial twenty minute work to be written for Maja and Jo Havlat. Jo is an amazing pianist who I have met a couple of times over the years at Dartington and Aldeburgh, he is the type of player that does not seem phased by anything you throw at him!

This piece came after a year in which a number of my pieces dealt with text, memory and dream space with works such as A tulip iron and A gift for control (recording coming soonish!). After my trip to the US visiting Santa Fe for the performance of my work Where skies aflame and coming home via Boston, I had of course visited Harvard’s wonderful poetry shop – Grolier Poetry again and amongst other books I bought Mary Oliver’s Dream Work Collection. The poem Dreams for me had a narrative where darkness and light, fear and hope, stillness, motion and energy are all intertwined. It is with these thoughts in mind I drew inspiration from her poem Dreams using its imagery and form as the basis for the intentionality of the work and its architectural structure.

The piece is split into four movements, each movement taking a line from the poem.

1. Dark bud of dreams
2. The Moon Staring
3. Leap Awake
4. Fire surges

Dreams by Mary Oliver

All night
the dark buds of dreams
open
richly.

In the center
of every petal
is a letter,
and you imagine

if you could only remember
and string them all together
they would spell the answer.
It is a long night,

and not an easy one—
you have so many branches,
and there are diversions—
birds that come and go,

the black fox that lies down
to sleep beneath you,
the moon staring
with her bone-white eye.

Finally you have spent
all the energy you can
and you drag from the ground
the muddy skirt of your roots

and leap awake
with two or three syllables
like water in your mouth
and a sense

of loss—a memory
not yet of a word,
certainly not yet the answer—
only how it feels

when deep in the tree
all the locks click open,
and the fire surges through the wood,
and the blossoms blossom.

Enjoy listening, and let me know what you think!