During the visit to Brive-la-Gaillarde in 1940, Poulenc sketched a little piece for the children of his cousins: Sophie, Sylvie, Benoit, Florence and Delphine Périer, Yvan, Alain, Marie-Christine and Marguerite-Marie Villotte, and their two friends Marthe Bosredon and André Lecoeur. This took the form of a musical background to Jean de Brunhoff's popular illustrated children's story about Babar, a baby elephant whose mother is killed by a huntsman. Fortunately Babar meets a kind elderly lady who dresses him in a fine suit and gives him an impressive motor-car.However, Babar feels homesick for his forests, and is pleased when his cousins, Arthur and Celeste, find him and needs no persuasion to go home with them. Back in the forest, where the King of the Elephants has eaten a poisonous mushroom, Babar is elected to succeed as King. He marries Celeste, and the last we hear of him is thinking of a rosy future as he dreamily looks up at a marvellously star-filled sky.Poulenc's score, to which he returned and completed in 1945, is for a narrator and a Piano, so written that the individual sections offer the pianist a number of self-contained descriptive pieces, such as a Lullaby, a Reverie, a Galop, a Nocturne and so on. Indeed, some of Poulenc's finest Piano music is found in these charming pages.In 1962, Jean Françaix made an orchestral version, and Barbar has been enjoyed by children of all ages all over the world. An English translation of the text was made by Nelly Rieu.This particular edition is arranged for Narrator and Piano duet (1 Piano, 4 hands) and a separate insert with English translation is included. / Piano 4 Mains

Upon entering a painting was written in 2008/09 and it was commissioned with funding from the Britten-Pears Foundation and the RVW Trust by Piano 4 Hands (Joseph Tong and Waka Hasegawa) to whom it is dedicated. The inspiration of the piece was the kind of painting which as you gaze at it seems to draw the onlooker into the frame indeed into the very paint itself. The specific trigger for the idea of the piece was the Rothko Exhibition at Tate Modern in 2008 Rothko has long been a favourite painter of mine even though his creative world is very different from my own. However there were one or two paintings in the exhibition in which I felt strongly this sense of beingdrawn into the inner life of the painting especially when I was able to incur the wrath of the curators and step close to the paintings and examine the surface in detail. The opening and closing sections of the piece with their gradual thickening of the harmonies and (at the end) equally gradual thinning reflect this sense of stepping forward into and backward out of the works. The inner life of the faster sections while apparently very un-Rothko-like reflects the extraordinary teeming inner life of the brush-strokes.

Danse Negre is a lively little piece with a performance time of approximately 2 minutes. Composed in 1908 it was originally scored for solo Piano but it has been arranged here for Piano Duet by Esther Fisher. It is the perfect piece for any pair of pianists looking for their first duet to perform.Cyril Scott (1879-1970) was a British composer pianist and poet. His most popular works which he is largely remembered by today were written in the years preceding the Second World War however he continued to compose prolifically in the face of indifference from the outside world right up until his death at the age of 91. His musicis predominantly in the Romantic style and serves as a tasteful reminder of a bygone age.