Commissioned by the BBC and written for Pamela Helen Stephen, Richard Hickox and the City of London Sinfonia

  • 2(afl).2.1+bcl.1+cbn/2200/timp/str
  • Mezzo soprano
  • 22 min

Programme Note

This work was written in 2002, for Pamela Helen Stephen, Richard Hickox and the City of London Sinfonia, commissioned by the BBC.

It sets four poems by George Mackay Brown from his collection Following a Lark. Poems full of a sense of the history – particularly the Viking history – landscape and nature of his native Orkney Islands.

The music consists of one continuous movement, elegiac in style. Mackay Brown had died in 1996, and this was intended as a very simple “memorial stone” for him, at about the time when a stone finally appeared on his grave overlooking Hoy Sound and the Atlantic, outside Stromness, his home town in Orkney.
Peter Maxwell Davies

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