Michael Berkeley: Dark Sleep: Klavier Solo

This evocative solo piano piece looks back, as though in some troubled dream, to fragments of Purcell and Tippett. The widely spaced opening notes are interrupted, after only eight bars, by a quick and relentlessly turbulentpassage. A brief reference to the opening of Tippett's Fourth Symphony leads into a slower, more expressive section; a predominantly mysterious, even glassy sound world from which emerges the poignant notes of Dido's Lament fromPurcell's Dido and Aeneas, now at last momentarily in its correct juxtaposition. Finally, a tiny fragment of the music is spun obsessively until it falls out of control and back into the carefully placed notes of the opening.