Metropolitan Games for piano duet (1967) was commissioned, and premiered, by Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney Bennett. On the one hand, the piece is ‘programmatic’, in that the title refers to the way in which travelling into the West End of London at that time (via the Metropolitan Line) was constantly disrupting my piece of mind. On the other hand, the music operates on an abstract level too and is concerned with harmonic and rhythmic schemes organised according to ‘expanded serial’ principles. The opening still chords with the repeated central A flat function as a kind of refrain in the music, alternating as they do initially with more frenetically rhythmic passages and then with a much more florid luxuriant middle section. The opening refrain returns at the very end of the piece, but much condensed. Four pivotal A flats are heard dying away at the very end of the piece.
© 1985 Tim Souster
