My second book of Études consists of eight movements, many of extreme technical difficulty, and follows on from the first book in exploring the history of the piano étude. In the first book, the even-numbered études engage with pieces by four of the most prominent étude composers: Ligeti, Chopin, Scriabin and Debussy. Here, the even-numbered études focus on a single, less artistically elevated source: Hanon’s The Virtuoso Pianist, a set of 60 exercises (decidedly not pieces of music) written for piano students in the 19th century and still in use today.

My four ‘Hanon études’ attempt to inject poetry into Hanon’s mundane figurations. ‘Bluebells’ and ‘Dream Canon’ are sweet and gentle, and are followed by the much more vigorous ‘Toccata (in the cold light of day)’. ‘An Encore for Maxim’ takes as its starting point the same Hanon figuration that Shostakovich draws on in the finale of his second Piano Concerto. That piece was written for his son Maxim’s graduation concert at the Moscow Conservatory, and the joke is about the long hours that Maxim and his fellow students would have spent practising Hanon over the course of their studies; here, I use the same figuration to create an imaginary encore for Maxim. Of the odd-numbered movements, Études 9 and 13 form a pair of movements, each focusing on a particular piano texture – octaves and staccato notes, respectively. Études 11 and 15 are more poetic in conception and, partly for this reason, contain greater internal contrast and are less conventionally ‘étude-like’.

As in my first book of Études, the movements here are free-standing and can be performed independently. However, they were – again, as in first book of Études – conceived as a set, with a broadly teleological structure. The set reaches a dramatic climax with ‘The Hunt’, before subsiding into the joyful but relatively calm final movement.