I have finally managed to complete a Symphony for orchestra which will be premiered by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Geoffrey Paterson on Saturday 10 March in City Halls, Glasgow. The performance will be recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3. The work is in one movement and lasts just under 20 minutes. Though it contains a slow ‘movement’, scherzo, trio and coda, they don’t (as Eric Morcambe said to Andre Previn) come ‘necessarily in the right order’. In fact, the Symphony opens with its final cadence, that in failing to achieve a satisfactory downbeat forces the music to reassemble itself over the course of its remaining 18 minutes. Basically, it is like a plane going down the runway, failing to take off and shunting itself back to the terminal building before heading back down the runway and finally taking wing. Somewhere at the back of my mind were those wonderful landscape paintings by Peter Lanyon, taken from a glider. I think that might be a helpful image in relation to the symphony. I think I am going over the same ground as all previous symphony composers since Haydn, but this time by air rather than horse and carriage.
