Carl Vine’s ‘Short Story’ from The Anne Landa Preludes (2006) has featured in Kathryn Stott’s final UK tour as a professional performer this summer and autumn.

The pianist gives 14 performances of the work, beginning at the Aldeburgh Festival on 21 June, followed by appearances at St Magnus Festival in Orkney and the Buxton International Festival. In the autumn Stott takes the piece to the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Wigmore Hall, Kettle’s Yard, Leeds Town Hall, and Liverpool’s Tung Auditorium. It appears as part of her Musical Postcards programme – a selection of musical favourites from across a distinguished career that includes music by Caroline Shaw, Graham Fitkin, Shostakovich, Chopin, and Rogers & Hammerstein.

The 3-minute ‘Short Story’ opens Vine’s 2006 collection of preludes, which celebrates the great Australian piano pedagogue. The ‘story’ of the title is not programmatic; rather, Vine says, its “drama emerges from its own internal logic”. From an ethereal beginning a long, falling melody emerges, before more animated figuration leads to an impassioned climax, before the opening material returns.

Vine intended the Preludes to be the successor to his Five Bagatelles. Each of its dozen movements aims to be as highly differentiated from its neighbours as he could make them. Its varied episodes include ‘Thumper’, which recalls Vine’s own youthful enthusiasm at the keyboard, ‘Sweetsour’, whose integration of contrasting moods pays homage to Chinese cuisine, the spiders Ariadne and Trevor, who together dance a Tarantella, and a pensive concluding Chorale.

In 2018 Stott premiered Vine’s Implacable Gifts for two pianos and orchestra, where she was joined by Piers Lane – another champion of Vine’s work – and the West Australian Symphony Orchestra conducted by Rory Macdonald for the premiere in Perth; they also performed the piece in Hobart with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, who co-commissioned the piece with WASO.