From a programme note by Assi Karttunen, who gave the first performance: This harpsichord solo piece, Les Chimères, takes its title from Gerard Nerval’s famous collection of poems. For Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval (1808– 1855) was a poet with an almost self-destructively intense perception of the world. Les Chimères is filled with harpsichord idiomatic sensitivities in respect of sonority, cool and clear harmonic progressions, tuneful melodic motives and long, sustained horizontal counterpoint. For example, the bars from 52–94 form a single, overarching phrase. The piece is fairly long including andante, flowing, moderato, and animato sections. The harmonic writing could often be described as polytonal, and yet this is not really what is going on, since the music by Graham is not really based on dominant-tonal-structures typical for the majority of tonal music. Therefore, there is a certain feel of impressionism or Parisian modernism (Poulenc, Satie, Milhaud) in this music.