MIGRATIONS for string orchestra (22 solo strings, 65542)(1998)

Commissioned by the Nieuw Sinfonietta Amsterdam for their 10th birthday season, and first performed by them conducted by Peter Oundjian and led by Candida Thompson, on January 8th 1999 at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam. It was first broadcast by them on Dutch radio channel 4 the same year conducted by Neal Stulberg.
The composer felt a need to write spacious music at this time and the migration of birds was his starting point. The images in his mind at first were memories of being in some remote part of Quebec and seeing thousands of geese heading for destinations unknown across the evening sky. Then the day in spring when the house-martins came into their nests under the eaves of his house in Wales, and the day in the autumn when they left again. Distance. Freedom. Journeying. These things determined the initial type of music for this work.
Then came thoughts of human jouneyings, migrations of peoples, often in tragic circumstances, such as in wars and persecutions. And these thoughts gave him a contrasted type of music, sad and expressive. There is a good deal of free writing in the work, which gives a sense of the crying of many birds, an evokation of many wings in flight, but it is contrasted by the solemn and funereal music of human suffering and captivity.
At the end, the opening free violin melody becomes a kind of chorale, a musical homecoming - but not quite the Promised Land.
DURATION 19'
(Published by Ascolta)