This single-movement work has the sub-title, ''Thirty-two variations and fugue on a theme of Haydn''. The theme is Haydn's palindromic Minuet, and Simpson's variations (all palindromic in turn) plunge at once into a characteristically personal world: what might have been a meditation on the geniality of the original becomes a tribute to its earthiness and poise, as well as its artifice. That other master of large-scale variation from, Beethoven, never wrote such palindromes, and in our time they are mre commonly associated with the serialism of Webern. But Simpson, recognizing that variations are more fundamentally about the balancing of contrasts than the elaboration of a unity, has achieved here a remarkably convincing overall form, as strong as it is flexible, as diverse as it is integrated. And the form is filled out with memorable material.
Simpson's invention at its finest transcends neo-Classical quirkiness as surely as it shuns post-Romantic self-indulgence. I would argue that he is at his best in slow, sustained music. The final stages of this work's fugue strive rather too obviously for resolution through various types of animated passage-work: but his slow writing has a visionary quality very rare in music at the moment and, for all its 'conservative' idiom, it is an idealistic, not an escapist vision.
Understandably, the Delme Quartet respond with tremendous dedication to a work written for their twentieth anniversary. The sound is possibly rather strident in the more turbulent variations, but the players rightly aim for the substance of the music, and not for mere beauty of texture. I cannot recommend this issue too highly.'