Paul Moravec’s music is firmly rooted in Western tradition, yet manages to sound at once fresh, elegant, and fiercely individual. His Tempest Fantasy, the work that won him the Pulitzer Prize in 2004, is a meditation on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and has been described by Fanfare magazine as ‘openly and ebulliently attractive, flowing with an effortless lyric pulse’. Mood Swings, named by The Washington Post as the best new classical composition of 1999, is a rhythmically charged work that endeavors to make audible the workings of the central nervous system. The disc ends with Scherzo, which the composer describes as ‘a compact, energetic encore-type work’.