Capriccioso is a musical response to Carel Fabritius' 1654 painting The Goldfinch, as well as the history surrounding the painting itself.

Generally, the music is meant to evoke the playfulness of the small bird in the painting. It is a stylish but silly bird: complicated, sparkling harmonies appear from the very beginning of the music, and short, pointy melodic ideas abound as I imagined the bird hopping around its home.

However, as the work evolved, I had two competing yet somehow related ideas in my mind: the first of the painter’s tragic death in the gunpowder explosion in Delft the same year the painting was completed, and the second of the bird losing its chain and flying away in escape. This brought about music with a mysterious, foreboding character, and in the end music for the bird miraculously taking off in flight.