'Travelling with Time' is a sequence of seven fairly new compositions by Anthony Gilbert (b. 1934). They all parallel, in their different ways, conflicts and near-resolutions in European history from the Nordic invasions across to our recent waves of persecution and instability. Gilbert grew up in a family whose ancestors on both sides fled religious persecution, and lived in the late 1930s alongside a young Viennese refugee from Nazism, a truly disturbing experience. Then, having in his early twenties worked as a translator and interpreter for the international water-supply industry, he was brought face-to-face with the kind of often prejudice-driven tensions that can exist between nations, in whose best interest it would have been to work together. Consequently, even some of his early works from that time have in them an element of tension and near-resolution between related elements - a not-uncommon compositional procedure, after all!

The ordering of the seven compositions on this CD aims to show, figuratively rather than literally, how early historical patterns of conflict and near-resolution in an otherwise peaceful context are mirrored in our own time. Forces vary from solo piano to string orchestra, via music-school ensemble with voice and chamber groups likewise. Two sets of three pieces, 'triptychs' one might say, are separated by a substantial Sonata acting as 'time-transition'. This creates an overall triptych-like structure for the disc – a 'composition' in its own right, one might say – an approach encouraged, almost subconsciously, by reading in 2013 a book of new poems by Lancashire-born Australian poet Sarah Day, entitled 'Tempo', which in their way reflect on the way time-past and time-present will come together.