General:         

Large-scale pieces of course are not well-suited to presentation on the web, which tends to skew the balance towards songs and smaller things. Here's a small attempt to offset that.

The Piano Suite was written for Sir Ernest Hall, the eccentric owner of the Dean Clough complex in Halifax, who’d trained as a concert pianist and celebrated his 65th birthday by hiring an orchestra and recording the three Bartok piano concertos. Extremely enthusiastic about the Suite at first, I think he got worried when he saw the technical difficulties of the Gavotte and the Chaconne; at any rate, he never played it, which is a pity.

The Piano Quintet is a 35- minute organic structure, mostly continuous except for what is apparently a movement break at the end of this extract; the later parts are technically quite demanding.

Planet Swatting is quite differentl, a moderately extended free improvisation for guitar and drums done a long time ago with almost no technology at all. It’s interesting to look back and see what we could do then without it.