John Woolrich

John Woolrich’s 'Watermark' is a ten-minute duo for the unusual combination of violin and bass clarinet. The two voices are like planets revolving around the same sun- treating the same material in tw...

When the writer Fernando Pessoa died in in Lisbon in 1935, he left behind a large trunk full of poetry, horoscopes, unfinished stories, essays, plays, translations, letters and journals, typed, handwr...

Commissioned by the Machynlleth Festival with funds from the ArtsCouncil of Wales and the Machynlleth Tabernacle Trust. This piano trio is a mosaic of chorales, frenetic string duets, slow melodies, a...

Commissioned by the Machynlleth Festival with funds from the ArtsCouncil of Wales and the Machynlleth Tabernacle Trust. This piano trio is a mosaic of chorales, frenetic string duets, slow melodies, a...

I borrowed the title of this piano quartet from Monteverdi's great madrigal sequence of 1610: "Lagrime d'Amante al Sepolcro dell'Amata". There are six main sections, behind each of which hovers the gh...

Although Adagissimo is short (lasting about eight minutes) it is built from numerous tiny inventions. The piece opens with slow, spare gestures passed gently back and forth between piano and strings....

I made my quintet (for string quartet and viola) by juxtaposing five distinct fragments: each one a facet of the same musical idea - an old Norman folksong, called La mort du roi Renaud - which happe...

This quintet might have been built from the shards of four or five other pieces, which have been broken up and roughly glued together. One of these originals could have been a horn solo (the new, comp...

Instrumentation: fl(=picc+afl).ob(=ca).cl.bcl.hn.bsn(=cbsn) 'The iron cockerel sings' is a short, fast, brightly-coloured collage of inventions written for the same instrumentation as Janacek's 'Mladi...

I took the title for this dark capriccio from an aichemical inscription carved on the tomb of a sixteenth century bishop in Worcester Cathedral: 'while I blow, I hope'. 'Dum Spiro, Spero' was commissi...

After Steven Isserlis played my Cello Concerto in 1998 he asked me to rework some of its material as a short work for cello and piano. A fall and a climb for the cello and two chiming passages for pia...

'Darker Still' explores the outer edges: the dark and the bright sides of the flute’s voice, lyricism and brutality, movement and stillness, the clear and the muffled, song and silence, are set agains...

Landscape with yellow birds The Bavarian Don Giovanni Tale à la Hoffmann Fish Magic A number of different inspirations float in and out of focus in this piece in a dream-like way. I started with the a...