This album was one of the first things I recorded when I moved to Copenhagen.
I was eager to let the wonderful pianist Cæcilie Grønkjær Tagmose have a go at these pieces!
When you write for film and TV, you need to be absolutely sure about how every single cue sounds, the duration and dynamics.. everything!
So allowing Cæcilie to put her touch and personality into the music was really quite inspiring for me.
It was recorded on a Steinway D at Juhl-Sørensen in Copenhgen.
MUSIC
Piano Fantasie no. 1 "Like Two Snowflakes Waiting for the Storm"
This is a good example of a bigger piece just coming alive from a very simple idea.
The opening intervals allowed for a modal approach to this piece, which was something I really hadn't played around with before. To explain that to non-musicians, it's using tones that are outside of the normal major and minor scales.
The piece grew, and when the title came to me, I decided to expand it into the fantasie you hear here.
It was my first really ambitious piano piece, and I'm still quite proud of it.
The "Storm" section (from 3:36 to 4:40) was lifted from another piece I wasn't really happy with.
5 short piano pieces
A friend of mine, who teaches the piano, told me that she sometimes needed shorter, quite easy pieces for her students. Especially when they participated in competitions where it was required to play works composed recently. She encouraged me to write some tonal pieces, and I'm glad she did as they have now been performed around the world!
There is a fun little thing, that I don't think I've shared before; As a dogma to myself, I decided that each piece should start on the same notes that the previous one ended on.
This really helped me composing them, as I was bound by a set of rules. Also, I do feel that it binds the pieces nicely together when played all together.