Whimsical Sketches of Fanciful Birds, Book 2

Each piece is a musical caricature, the composer imagining his fanciful birds as larger-than-life cartoon characters represented through musical moods and gestures that are at times correspondingly exaggerated for comic or tender effect. The pieces in Book 2 exhibit a range of contrasting but complementary moods. In “Stoned Vulture”, the piano and saxophone trade languid, cascading lines; “Mobster Magpie” is a jazzy moto perpetuo; in “Baby Phoenix”, strange otherworldly calls emanate from saxophone’s mouthpiece, accompanied by aeolian harp sounds strummed within the piano; the saxophone’s “Sedated Seagull“ floats dreamily above limpid piano chords that traverse the piano’s full register; and “Paranoid Hummingbird” alternates nervous, disjointed, darting motifs with implacable, motoric rhythms. Adventurous performers will relish the scope the composer offers throughout these pieces to exercise their own creative freedom of interpretation. While each collection forms a satisfying group when performed as a whole, individual pieces will make a pleasingly quirky contribution to a recital.