Few things could have prepared society for the global pandemic that gripped the world from 2020-21. From that darkness, however, there emerged numerous avenues for creative reflection. Musicians suddenly had a lot of time on their hands, and an opportunity to develop their art in new and ambitious directions. During this period, Portuguese composer Pedro Faria Gomes, whose imaginative and communicative music combines clear originality with a confident respect for tradition, turned to the piano. His initial idea was to write a variation on two sets of four notes. Faria shared the resulting movement with pianist Kenneth Hamilton, his colleague at Cardiff University School of Music. Hamilton was impressed with the piece, and a plan evolved to compose a more elaborate work. This developed into the ten-movement, strikingly thought-provoking Suite J – the ‘J’ refers to Faria’s daughter Joana – recorded for the first time on this disc.

A little while later, Faria’s second child, Daniel, was born. This in turn was the inspiration for the charmingly witty Sonatina, a gracefully concise companion piece to the Suite, also conceived to be premiered and recorded by Kenneth Hamilton. Both works pay heartfelt homage to historical genres – the Baroque suite, the Classical sonatina – while drawing inspiration from a web of allusion and quotation more redolent of the Romantic piano music of Robert Schumann. Accordingly, the title of the album – Scenes from Childhood – is gratefully borrowed from Schumann's collection of the same name. This is nevertheless no Album for the Young, rather a nostalgically adult reflection on early childhood, and a moving, modern meditation on the music of earlier eras.