University of York Music Press

Time and the Seasons was a special commission by the Oxford Lieder Festival, and was premiered by Roderick Williams and Andrew West on 16th October 2013 in the Holywell Music Room Oxford. Finch writes,

The seven songs of Time and the Seasons are framed by winter, ending with a piece which has existed since 2007 in its own right: a winsome image of the laughter of the composer's wife bringing life to a bleak Norfolk beach. The voice watches winter sleep, in a monotone made haunting by mesmeric speech inflections. And the piano, in a high trilling sharp and bright as hoar frost, gradually descends ever deeper into hibernation. Happy memories of childhood days on that same Norfolk beach peal out of "Spring", as the voice's rhythmic energy is released, and melismas melt winter into spring. Voice and piano rise in gentle oscillation as past and present are held at the horizon in "Time's Ellipse", before a languid "Summer Seascape" for solo piano, and a frolicking, rollicking "Summer Psalm". The voice hovers unaccompanied in "Autumn"; and Roderick Williams's peerless enunciation enables us to enjoy every second of the meeting of word and tone. And "The Beach in Winter" blows eddies of piano writing through sea and sand until a human smile redeems Time.

Hilary Finch, review in The Times