Into The River

'The River' is concerned with how a location holds and hide memories, and inadvertently how perspective and time creates unreliable narrators. Rasti explores how memory gets reassigned, she paraphrases Heraclitus, “We never step in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and we are not the same human being.” Illustrating her thoughts she took small sequences from famous classical pieces and replayed and replayed these tiny fragments until they became unrecognisable.

Two men with questionable pasts, Glyn McLyntock and his friend Cole, lead a wagon-train load of homesteaders from Missouri to the Oregon territory. They establish a settlement outside of Portland and as winter nears, it is necessary for McLyntock and Cole to rescue and deliver food and supplies being held in Portland by corrupt officials. On the trip back to the settlement, up river and over a mountain, Cole engineers a mutiny to divert the supplies to a gold mining camp for a handsome profit.

First recordings of two powerful works from the pen of one of our major composers, John McCabe, who is celebrating his sixtieth birthday this year. Of Time and the River (the title is taken from Thomas Wolfe's novel) is actually the published title of McCabe's Fourth Symphony, written in 1993/4 to a commission by the BBC. The Flute Concerto was written for James Galway in 1989/90 and he gave the first performance of it in 1990 with Michael Tilson Thomas and the London Symphony Orchestra who commissioned the work. Here it is played by the outstanding young flautist Emily Beynon in her first recording for Hyperion.

Tales of escape and adventure on Britain’s waterways