Born in Cape Town, John Joubert won a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London, his successful career as a university lecturer and composer keeping him in England thereafter. Inspired by Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (from Remembrance of Things Past), Temps Perdu is an inventive set of variations ‘each exploring some aspect of the memories evoked by the original’. The finely crafted Sinfonietta is notable for the imaginative writing for solo woodwinds, while the song-cycle The Instant Moment indelibly expresses widely contrasting reactions to the experience of love.