Double Image (1999)

Commissioned by Rainbow over Bath with funds from South West Arts for Double Image, and first performed on 3rd November 1999, Michael Tippett Centre, Bath by Double Image.

Double Image is a work of contrasts – bright melodies followed by dark, blurred sections, serene, unmoving harmonies matched with aggression. It is in two movements, and while each one is ‘of itself', there is at the same time, a revisiting in the second of many ideas in the first. Thus the clipped rhythms from the opening of the work are found again in quite a different context at the static opening to the second movement, and the turbulent piano semiquavers near the beginning appear much later – coloured differently in the lower reaches of the instrument where the piano's strings have been ‘prepared'.

Diana Burrell