Although I am still a student, and I haven't pinned down my personal style yet, I tend to prefer things which sound quite tonal and not dissonant, so this piece you are about to hear was a bit of an experiment for me.
I had long been a fan of the works of the works of Olivier Messiaen, the great French composer who, due to 2008 being the centenary of his birth, is being featured heavily at the Proms this year. I had never drawn directly on Messiaen as a source of inspiration for a piece before, but I decided that it might be fun to do a piece based on birdsong. The Royal Northern College of Music had a Messiaen festival in May of this year, during which recordings of birdsong were played in and around the college, mirroring Messiaen's own fascination with it. I recorded a bunch of clips on my phone, then spent a while playing them back and trying to come up with interesting melodic material which behaved in the same way as the birdsong. Eventually I wrote a short 3-4 minute piece called 'Cardinal Elegy' for oboe and cello. The title comes from the North American Cardinal, a beautiful red feathered bird which resides on the east coast of the U.S. This bird also has a personal significance to me, as my mother's side of my family come from America, more specifically Maryland, the state for which the Cardinal is the 'official bird'.
The piece isn't programmatic, and doesnt really try to do too much. It can be separated into 3 parts, an opening slow section, a quicker middle section, and a final slow section. In the opening minute, my material is introduced, shadowed by the cello on high harmonics. The piece then lurches forward into a much faster section, where neither instrument is really in control, and they become much more like two solos intertwined, than a single functioning unit. This builds up and eventually burns out with the oboe finishing on a top E-flat. The closing section is lets the tension wind down, and both instruments play short solo passages before running out of rhythmic energy.
I am playing the oboe part myself on the recording, and I would like to give my thanks to my friend Lauren Webb, a fellow student at the RNCM who learned a mischevously tricky cello part at very short notice.
