This selection of works, the relationships be-tween the piccolo and its partners - meeting en petit comité - are anything but straight- forward. Sometimes the instruments simply test the waters; in other instances they go on to imitate, challenge, even argue. More 5 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.