Whimsical Sketches of Fanciful Birds, Book 3

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 saxophone in “Caffeinated Robyn” flits about in response to startling interjections from the piano; both instruments in “Corporate Puffin” proceed mechanistically together as if the music is being created on a factory assembly line line; in “Charming Goldfinch” the instruments begin locked in rhythmic unison and until bursting apart into ecstatic independent lines; “Love Birds” pares the texture back to a rhapsodic two-part duet; and “The Angel and the Mockingbird” contrasts the restless, questing of the saxophone with the peaceful organ-like tremolando chords of the piano accompaniment. 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.