An explosive opening cadenza throws the soloist in at the deep end! Beginning in this way greatly appeals to me, an idea from Sonny Rollins’s ‘Autumn Nocturne’, a piece that also captures something of the relentless energy I wanted to create in my concerto. My work is continuous but in two parts, responding to the poems that were a central muse: ‘A Match with the Moon’ by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and ‘The Moon Sails Out’ by Frederico Garcia Lorca. A sense of mystery pervades both poems; the figurative language of the first has a fun and playful nature, while Lorca encapsulates a subtle but profound sense of loss.