This selection of works, the relationships between the piccolo and its partners - meeting en petit comité - are anything but straightforward. Sometimes the instruments simply test the waters; in other instances they go on to imitate, challenge, even argue. More often than not, they do all of this at once, in shifting proportions. Throughout the programme, the piccolo reveals a surprising range of identities: it carries melodic weight, but can just as easily turn pointillistic, grate like a grain of sand in a mechanism, crackle with energy, burst with percussive force or disrupt the flow of melody and rhythm. For composers, there is something inherently intriguing about pushing the piccolo beyond its comfort zone. You can hear it in the opening gestures of these works: they rarely begin with a clear-cut statement, but with some kind of exploration. Two or three instruments are feeling their way forward, without consensus, testing how close they can come without losing their individual character.