From Steam to Stillness: A Journey Home

From Steam to Stillness: A Journey Home

This recital traces the arc of a musician’s soul: the thrill of youthful departure into the unknown, the ache of longing for home, the return, and the bittersweet pull of responsibility once more. The programme opens with Gaubert’s Fantaisie, effervescent and searching, before Ian Clarke’s The Great Train Race propels us into motion. Burton’s Sonatine offers a moment of arrival: warmth and grace, coloured by the quiet complexity of lived experience.

At the heart of the recital is the world premiere of Gareth McLearnon’s Saudade for alto flute and piano — a meditation on that untranslatable longing for what is loved and distant, where presence and absence coexist. In this work, the deeper, more veiled voice of the alto flute becomes the sound of memory itself.

The recital closes with Franck’s Sonata in A Major. Originally written for violin, its four movements move from tenderness to urgency, through introspection and searching, before arriving at a quiet, luminous acceptance.

Together, these works form a journey — one that resonates with the shared experience of departure, return, and remembrance.