Bbc Music 2023

This recording presents a magnificent opportunity to hear for the first time an 81-minute orchestral score by Vaughan Williams in good sound. Not to be missed.

This recording presents a magnificent opportunity to hear for the first time an 81-minute orchestral score by Vaughan Williams in good sound. Not to be missed.

When I started work on Geyser last autumn I had decided I was done composing music that reflected the pain of the pandemic. This new piece was to be instead a celebration – of music, its welcome return and that unique atmosphere created by musicians when they meet to perform. Its mood was to be predominantly joyful and optimistic, while its title was a metaphor for the music’s underlying rhythmic energy, unleashed intermittently in ecstatic outbursts – like explosions of water and steam from a pressurised geothermal spring. (This idea of tension, boiling under the surface, is a theme I return to in a lot in my music.)