BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra 2

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra 2

Ashley Fure:  Bound to the Bow (European Premiere)

Evan Johnson:  measurement as contrition: three canons (World Premiere)

Kristin Þóra Haraldsdóttir:  In Praise of Darkness (UK Premiere)

Marc Sabat:  The Luminiferous Aether (BBC Commission, World Premiere)

Ashley Fure’s Bound to the Bow made her a Pulitzer-Prize finalist and is a mesmerising piece, at once rigorous and evocative, inspired by Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. measurement as contrition is, in the composer’s words, “an inaccessible, distant, privately meditative, hovering over the measurement of spaces and the weighing of volumes… The orchestra is there, in large part, as potential, an outer bound”. In Praise of Darkness was written for the Dark Music Days festival in Reykjavík, and Haraldsdóttir explores the dark using unusual tunings, loops and natural cycles. Berlin-based Canadian composer Marc Sabat typically draws inspiration from investigations of the sounding and perception of Just Intonation, and his new BBC Commission explores “gradually shifting harmonic constellations with melodic counterpoints”.