Definitely Arvo Part-driven, this is a relentless piece set in D minor. Huge, lumbering trolls hurl boulders at each other in the mountains through a torrential downpour. The boulders and the rain are heavy, the rocks boom. The fight in the monsoon continues from start to finish, if anything becoming more and more thick and stormy right to the end.…
Heloisa Pinto is the actual name of the girl from Ipanema. The songwriters were sitting at a café there in the morning and she walked past, and inspired one of the world’s most famous tunes.
Here is a Hoedown, written in 2011 for the brass and percussion sections of ICO. ICO is an orchestra based in Warsaw, comprising of young musicians from seven eastern / ex-Soviet countries: Poland, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia and Moldova. For those eastern players, I wrote the most Western-like tune I could think of, a Hoedown.
The first movement of this piece can be found bigged-up as the first movement of Factions. Mike Allen (Co-Principal trumpet in the RPO) and I spent a month in 1988 touring round Germany with an American Company doing West Side Story. It was brilliant fun at that age, and we couldn’t care less that some of the venues were pretty…
