17 July 2020

Always lovely to hear old pieces in new hands, especially when the hands are those of Sarah Saviet and Joseph Houston.

I wrote Wie Soll ich meine Seele halten, based on Rilke’s Liebeslied, in 2006 for my wife and me to play. Looking back, it seems to point in two directions – backwards, to the period in which I was studying with Michael Finnissy, and forwards, towards work where I started to reduce drastically the material content of the music and to work with very simple materials.

This beautiful performance was given online on 19th May 2020 by Sarah and Joseph as part of a series of lockdown concerts at the BKA Theater, Berlin. It’s first in the concert, which also features fantastic performances of Mark Barden, Cassandra Miller, Xenakis and Feldman.