Images From the Floating World (2019)

The writing is varied and imaginative without ever resorting to gimmicks. It even pays brief oblique homage to older composers such as Carl Nielsen. It can be fairly exacting and demanding, but it can also be disarmingly and deceptively simple, and deeply expressive. Take the last movement: a simple tune emerges from a pizzicato figuration and is “layered up in canon”, and that leads the quartet to its conclusion. I enjoyed this work enormously. I hope that many ensembles will avidly pick it up; it deserves to be heard.