Description

The score includes a few punning references to ‘Buffy the Vampire-Slayer’ – the TV series that inspired the title and which found an avid viewer in our youngest daughter, who used to play the clarinet. The opening is marked “Grave, but with a swing”. “Allaggro” should be read as “all aggro” or rather more prosaically, as allegro agitato. Whatever the tempo, however, it should be ‘swung’ and played with a fair degree of rubato and a suitably dark sense of humour.

The Monington Duo – Robert Blanken (clarinet) and Karen Kingsley (piano) – gave the piece’s first two performances in 2006, initially in Portsmouth and then in London. A critic who attended the London concert gave his impression of the work: “The concert finished with Cedric Peachey’s Buffie’s Waltz; a sardonic, witty finale inspired by a certain American television programme. The constantly lurching tempo and clarinet writing moving from fruity low register to the very highest squeals conjured a wise-cracking, nightmare world from which we were suddenly woken with a side-slipping ending.”