My friends Shirley Brill and Jonathan Aner commissioned Wergeland’s Flower in 2008 for a concert in Norway, celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Norway's national poet, Henrik Wergeland. The "flower" in the work's title has to do with the organically unfolding sense of the overall form. It is also the title of the last movement, where the simple, quasi-Norwegian scherzo tune of the clarinet finally abandons the complexity and fugal games and imitations of the piano.