Although John Pickard's music has received a good many performances and radio broadcasts over the past decade, it was the relay of his dazzling orchestral tone poem The Flight of Icarus (1990) during the 1996 Proms1 which brought him to the notice of the wider concert–going and –listening public. There is some justice in that piece attracting such attention, as it is one of his most immediate in impact, while completely representative of his output at large. That output to date encompasses three symphonies (1983–4, 1985–7, 1995–6) and five other orchestral works, three string quartets (1991, 1993, 1994; a fourth in progress), a piano trio (1990), sonatas for piano (1987) and cello and piano (1994–5), vocal and choral works, pieces for orchestral brass (Vortex, 1984–5) and brass band – the exhilarating Wildfire (1991), which crackles, hisses and spits in ferocious near–onomatopoeia, and suite Men of Stone (1995), celebrating four of the most impressive megalithic sites in Britain, one to each season of the year. There are other works for a variety of solo instruments and chamber ensembles, such as the intriguing grouping of flute, clarinet, harpsichord and piano trio in Nocturne in Black and Gold (1983) and the large–scale Serenata Concertante for flute and six instruments of a year later. Still in his mid-thirties – he was born in Burnley in 1963 – Pickard has already made almost all the principal musical forms of the Western Classical tradition his own, with only opera, ballet and the concerto as yet untackled.