Into the Rose-Garden was written for the Royal Academy of Music, one of 200 solo pieces commissioned to mark the institution’s bicentenary.
The title of this short work comes from the first of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, ‘Burnt Norton’:
‘Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden’.
The door into my rose-garden is the tiny repeating motif heard from the very start, which leads into a series of short episodes of differing kinds of expression. At the end, the motif reveals itself as a quotation from one of the central works in the oboe repertoire, which I, now long ago, played.
