On the Fiddle (1993)

At 14 minutes, Michael Nyman's 'On the Fiddle' is the longest work on the disc. Here sections of tonal melody - touchingly, sometimes achingly, fragile - are starckly counterpoised by more robust and boisterous passages. Nyman is a great dissembler: one of the intriguing features of the piece is that it both is, and is not, what it seems to be. Written out of a background knowledge of two or more centuries of music in the western classical tradition, it evokes aspects of that past and then, in the very same gesture, conceals or denies them.