A Flight of Sunbirds (2001)
(nine bagatelles for piano duet)

I’ve always been attracted to composing miniature duets in the hope that young musicians might find both them both enjoyable and challenging – a potent combination – and that they might be useful for students to perform with their teachers. When my own children were very young I began a series of recorder duets, and over the years these have been adapted for pairs of strings, woodwinds, trumpets and keyboards as the necessity arose.

I was especially pleased when my friend the pianist Elizabeth Green commissioned this set of piano duets. Some of them are arrangements of earlier pieces; some have been especially conceived for the medium. They’re intended to be performable by enthusiastic young pianists, amateurs and professionals and on the whole they’re more a test of musicianship than technical prowess.

The first performance was given at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music on 17 July 2001 by Elizabeth Green and Erzsi Marosseky.