Duration: 3 minutes

Audio samples:

•     Impromptu

On the morning of 15 July 1983, I was due to attend a celebratory event to mark Julian Bream's 50th birthday. I looked around for a suitable card and then decided I should write a musical one. Julian had had a long association with my father, Lennox, and premiered my Sonata in One Movement for guitar at the 1982 Edinburgh Festival. In the making of that I had spent many hours working with him and really getting inside the instrument. The Impromptu I created for Julian's birthday (a little vignette based on the musical letters in his name - B E and A) makes the most of his lyrical gifts and the melody heard in the treble part of the instrument reappears in the bass register. He later wrote to me to say that it would make a good encore piece, but it also works well with a more busy piece of mine, Worry Beads.

Impromtpu was first performed on Radio 3 in 1985 by Anthea Gifford.

Duration: 4 minutes
Published by Oxford University Press

Audio samples:

•     Lament

Duration: 8 minutes
Year of composition: 2024

I began sketching this 7- to 8-minute piece in 2022 having come across a recording of Julian Bream premiering my 'Sonata in One Movement' at the 1982 Edinburgh Festival. I had spent some time with Julian, as had my father, Lennox, learning about how to write for what Julian called ‘The Old Box’. Several of the ideas in the Sonata and in Craig Ogden’s subsequent recording of Lennox’s and my guitar music (Chandos) struck me as being starting points for a new piece, for example, the melodic intervals and the use of repeated notes which is such a hallmark of the Spanish repertoire. I sent a draft to the guitarist Paul Galbraith who I have long admired and he suggested minor changes to a couple of bars.

The Morning Star becomes visible just before sunrise and is thus a harbinger of dawn and daylight. The music starts with a mere glimmer before the repeated notes assert themselves. I particularly like to contrast the natural voice of the strings with their ability to take on a more metallic, edgy sound. The singing quality of the instrument comes to the fore in a middle section that is marked subito calmo, dolce e cantabile. This melody returns before the star ascends into the stratosphere and disappears.

Duration: 12 minutes
Published by Oxford University Press

Audio samples:

•     Sonata in One Movement

Duration: 6 minutes
Published by Oxford University Press

Audio samples:

•     Worry Beads

Worry Beads was chosen as one of the set pieces at the first Maurizio Biasini International Classical Guitar Competition, held from October 10-16 2011 in Bologna, Italy.