David Earl teaches at Cambridge University, and, prior to settling there, he spent seven years in Oxford. He describes Oxymorons as miniature tone poems reflecting friends and places he encountered during his Oxford years. The title also relates to the paradoxical idea that he was writing tonal music at a time when it was not considered de rigueur. Following the same order as Preludes by Chopin and others, this set begins in C major and its relative minor, and cycles through all the keys to F major and D minor.
The nine pieces that make up Scenes from a South African Childhood are personal essays from a specific time and place, which are universally evocative through their very specificity. David Earl grew up on the small estate, Old Nectar, in the Jonkershoek Valley north of Cape Town. The music evokes scenes of a young David walking through the gardens of Old Nectar with his mother; flyfishing with his father in the river flowing through the valley; vacationing at Groot Drakenstein and discovering there Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25, which becomes indelibly associated with the place. Then moving to Cape Town, where its monuments, beaches, trees, and warm southern-hemisphere Christmases create their own nostalgia, expressed here through music.
