Cavatina & Villanelle – Flute and Piano

For quite a few years before I took up the clarinet I was a serious recorder player and I wrote a little suite of pieces in the style of Byrd and Farnaby for recorder and spinet called ‘His Folly’. Some years later I decided to write a couple of simple very simple pieces for flute and piano which were also within the treble recorder range. The first was Cavatina (29 bars in total) and the second was Roundelay (45 bars in total). A few years ago my flautist wife Wendy (for whom the pieces were originally written) played them through and it occurred to me that each of them could be capable of being considerably reworked. I did this and in the course of re-composing the Roundelay became so different that I felt the original title was no longer appropriate. Thus the rather slender Roundelay became a fully fleshed Villanelle.