This enchanting 8-minute piece for violin and piano - Oliver Knussen's penultimate work - is made up of various kinds of musical reflection: melody reflected in its inversion; a six-note mode reflected in its complement; and the relationships between the three main parts of the piece, which are in a way varied reflections of each other. There are some reflections in water, too, the work's opus number (31a) demonstrating a relationship to Knussen's unfinished Cleveland Pictures: `The main melody began as a response to Gauguin's painting of a Breton woman swimming', Knussen wrote, `and there is...

O Hototogisu! is presented here as a typeset score with two facsimile pages from the composer's manuscript. This exquisite `fragment of a Japonisme' - premiered in 2017 and conceived as a kind of double concerto for soprano, flute and ensemble of 23 players - proved to be Oliver Knussen's final work. The 8-minute piece couches seven exquisite haiku settings in richly evocative music which incorporates signals from Japanese theatre (particularly Kabuki). It concerns the Hototogisu (or Lesser Cuckoo), a bird widely invoked in Japanese haiku poetry of the 17th-19th centuries, where the...

Oliver Knussen's concise and effervescent Eccentric Melody occupies a small but important place in the solo cello repertoire, and would enliven any recital. Composed as a double tribute - for cellist Fred Sherry, in his 50th birthday year, to play to Elliott Carter on his 90th birthday - the 2-minute work is presented here in manuscript facsimile.

Study for "Metamorphosis" for solo bassoon was composed by Oliver Knussen in the early 1970s but was withdrawn and later revised by the composer in 2018. Two earlier versions of the piece exist: an incomplete copy of the work's earliest incarnation - entitled Study in Metamorphosis and dated 1972 - and a revised version from 1973, which uses the current title.