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Chants du Printemps, for Chamber Orchestra (18')

Chants du Printemps was written for Ensemble 10/10 and first performed by the ensemble, conducted by Clark Rundell, in Liverpool in October 2013 with a further performance at the RNCM in Manchester. This piece is an expansion and recomposition of an earlier, smaller work Canto di Primavera, which I completed in 2010. This ‘source’ work was scored

for two oboes, cor anglais, harp and simple percussion (it was written for amateur players). As can be seen above, my interest in creating larger projects from ‘source’ works has been a characteristic of my recent work; Chants du Printemps is more than twice the length of the source work. In the initial work (Canto) there had been a couple of oblique references to

the Danse des Adolescentes from Le Sacre du Printemps. With the centenary of the Stravinsky coming in 2013, I decided to expand the links with Le Sacre for the new piece, and in so doing further address some of the concerns about my musical language expressed in the commentary of On Reflection. I further decided that I would not quote directly from Le Sacre, but that the references to it would be misquotations, ‘half remembered’; so, in the final pages, there are three such references to Part I of Le Sacre, layered on top of each other. In working in this way, I have attempted to develop some of the processes explored in Uneasy Vespers Part II, and again have worked to integrate these into other aspects of my musical language that owe more to what can loosely be described

as serial thought. The process of recomposition also entailed re-ordering the movements, with the short second movement of Canto di Primavera being extended into the finale, and the original fourth (Dance) movement being placed second in Chants du Printemps.