The composer writes the following about this work: 'As if we could only walk sideways in a tilted force field, Petruska-Harlequin in my piece evokes waltz fragments on a capsized 'Titanic', or Berlioz's Romeo und Juliet. Vertiginous chromatic martellato-staccato sequences keep tearing apart the clarinet's virtuosic aerial gymnastics interspersed among the fragments and half-heard wisps of sound.

We suddenly find ourselves now in the depths, now in the highest regions, sidelong, as if all the...