About

My friendship with Jeremy Filsell extends back forty years. It has provided many of my most memorably rewarding artistic collaborations, including both his matchless championing of my music for organ and piano solo and, way back in the 1990s, a number of two-piano recital appearances together. After one such concert performance Jeremy suggested that I might write a piece for us to play. A glance back through old programmes suggests that he said this in 1994… Sometimes it takes me just a little while to get around to things; accordingly the two piano work presented here duly emerged just over a quarter-century later, early in 2020, a product of the Covid-induced ‘lockdown’ then gripping many parts of the world. By this time my fellow pianist had long since emigrated from the UK to the US, possibly despairing at my resemblance to the Irish official in an old joke who, when asked by a frustrated tourist what was the local equivalent term for the mañana mentality, responded reprovingly, ‘there is no word in our language or culture that conveys anything like that degree of urgency’.

The only possible title for this work was Tandem: not only is the music in effect ‘a cycle made for two’, but by a happy chance ‘tandem’ is also the Latin for ‘finally’ or ‘…at LAST!’. When it came to rehearsing together, we confronted the small matter of the Atlantic Ocean stretching between us. We were briefly in the same place for a matter of hours in June 2022 and able to try out Tandem – and then had a few days in New York to put our respective efforts together before the première on 27th October that year, in a concert given at St Thomas Church, 5th Avenue, New York, where Jeremy Filsell is Organist and Director of Music.

Movt. 1: 11'45"

Movt. 2: 9"

Movt . 3: 6.05"

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