A close friendship proved the catalyst for Between friends, a memorial to Graeme Mitchison (1944-2018), a multi-disciplined scientist, intrepid adventurer, cyclist, paraglider, mountaineer and a possessor of two pianos on which he and Dove would play together for over forty years. Commissioned for the 2019 London Piano Festival at Kings Place and premiered by the performers on this album, this work evokes a long-term joyous friendship in the form of four conversations.

The first conversation is a brief build up, culminating in a sonorous flourish, which provides a short prelude to the second, which follows without a break. This ebullient moto perpetuo, with its slowly shifting patterns and sonorities seems an affectionate tribute to the Process music of the 1970s, couched in Dove’s distinctive harmonic vocabulary, with a chordal clarion call that is tossed between both players—a virtuoso display of fairness and affectionate competition between the two. The more relaxed, muted third conversation has a hint of elegy, and builds three times to a climax, each time with a different harmonic outcome, the third striking an almost triumphal note before the discourse subsides to the mood of the beginning. The quicksilver fourth conversation starts with a quiet challenge from one player, immediately answered by the other which escalates into a playful competition, veering from a manic tarantella, through lyrical episodes and rumbustious moments that careen close to evoking a Rock and Roll bass, before evaporating quickly in a surprise conclusion.

from notes by Julian Grant © 2025