University of York Music Press

This work was commissioned by Christopher Orton, who is one of Britain's rising musical stars. He won first prize in the 2007 Moeck/SRP International Solo Recorder Competition and is the recipient of the BBC Performing Arts Trust Award - a first for a recorder player. This award provided the funds to commission Simaku, whose work for alto and tenor recorders is the fifth in his Soliloquy series. Each composition within the series is for a solo instrument, as Simaku explains: 'The idea was a cycle of solo pieces creating contrasting characters within the same protagonist who "narrates" in different languages. Each piece operates on a different instrumental canvas and is elaborated according to the expressive qualities and the technical potentiality of each instrument.' An earlier work, Soliloquy II, features in the Fotoszene Nürnberg exhibition Zeitrauschen, launched in November 2008. The exhibition combines images from many of Germany's leading photographers with Simaku's composition as recorded by the cellist Neil Heyde and released on the Naxos label. http://www.fotoszene-nuernberg.de