Peter Furniss (clarinet) and David Leiher Jones (piano) will be holding a recital to celebrate the recent Clarinet Classics CD release, Time Pieces, 60 years of American music for clarinet and piano. The recital will take place on Wednesday, 24th October at 7:30pm. The Warehouse, 13 Theed Street, London, SE1 8ST.

Later today I’m shlepping my family to Budapest for three weeks of fun, cake and eccentric conveyances. Someone recently asked if this trip has anything to do with my turning 40. I hadn’t made the connection, but since then my explanation as to why we’re going has been “mid-life crisis”. I can’t afford a motorcycle. And they scare me.

As of yesterday, a new draft of the libretto for Eros at Breakfast is complete. As lyricist, I’ve been the one holding it up. Contact me privately if you’re a theater person and would like to read it. It’s been interesting: I’ve discovered that one of the nice things about doing my own lyrics is that a big part of the composing takes place at the same time. I get rhythms in my head, and can sort of already hear the music in most cases. So I hope that will mean that the composing part will go quickly. (Yeah, right.)

The new CD containing my clarinet/piano piece American Standard has been out in the U.K. for a while and is inching toward release in the U.S. Amazon says it will by July 24th. Meanwhile, it’s now showing up (at a better price) for order direct from the distributor Qualiton. Also, I’m trying something new and have made the score and part of the piece available through the nifty distribution service from Subito Music.

Maybe I’ll do some blogging from Budapest. We’ll see.

Performing on the recording are clarinettist Peter Furniss and pianist David Leiher Jones, both good friends since our Budapest Liszt Academy days a really long time ago. (They taught me all about Marmite and how to curse properly in English.) American Standard was originally written for Peter, who’s performed it numerous times around the world.

The disc also includes a magnificent performance of the Bernstein Sonata as well as works by Victor Babin, James Cohn, Robert Muczynski and Richard Dudas, another Budapest cohort.

The release is scheduled for June, and I will, no doubt, crow about it again here at that time.

In 2004 I wrote the score for Shakespeare’s Merchant, an independent film adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. The film is still making its way through the process of festival submissions, etc., but I’m so proud of the score that I’ve taken it upon myself to arrange for it to be released on CD.

It’s a short movie with an epic score. The director wanted a lot of underscoring, and so in many places the music resembles opera, where the orchestra frequently carries the subtext and the emotional weight. I frequently accuse myself of being derivative, but this is some of my most original work, (although any listener who’s a Sondheim fan will hear that influence). One of my jobs was to help set a scene where people are routinely nasty to each other, and so it’s mostly a dark, tense score with some lyrical and humorous moments.

The CD is available now at CD Baby, and will soon be on Amazon as well. Sound clips can be heard on the film’s web site. (Click “Soundtrack”)