For Hands Vier Hände

for Patrick David Wood
2019 BEASTFEaST Performance Recording (May 3, University of Birmingham, UK)
=> please use headphones for detailed listening

2016 digital audio media file for performance

This composition is made entirely of piano recordings.

It includes parts of five Hungarian Dances, as piano duets, by Johannes Brahms, performed with one of my piano students, Patrick Wood, during the early 1990s.

It also includes segments from a set of recordings of my own playing over recent years, including several Mazurkas by Frederic Chopin, an early composition by Richard Strauss, a Prelude by Johann Sebastian Bach, a short section of the Requiem by Gabriel Faure, and my arrangements of the Scottish folksong Annie Laurie and the Irish folksong The Lark in the Clear Air. And it has clips from my arrangement of a new tune for the Irish folksong  The Salley Gardens, with words by William Butler Yeats.

For Hands Vier Hände was completed at the Music Research Centre, University of York, England, with support from the US-UK Fulbright commission.