Full score, vocal score and parts for hire

Renewal owes its origins to a remark I made at the pre-concert talk for the first performance, in the spring of 1992, of what has now become its third part.  I said then that I had thought of Broken Symmetry as perhaps the scherzo of a ‘mega-work’.  After its second performance, at the Proms that same year, Nicholas Kenyon reminded me of what I had said, and asked me when I was going to write the rest of it.  Although I hadn’t really thought through the implications of writing something on such a large scale (Broken Symmetry alone lasts a little over twenty minutes) the idea of doing something gradually grew, and the prospect of composing a work to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the Third Programme – only a few months younger than myself – made it concrete.

For the framework of the second part, a Threnody dedicated to the memory of Toru Takemitsu, who died while I was writing it, I turned to another pre-existing piece, Memorial, composed for the London Symphony Orchestra in 1992.  But I only used the opening section of that work, for strings, piano and harp, and the music develops in a different direction from its original.  The opening Intrada a 70^th birthday present for Hans Werner Henze, is scored for  wind, brass, and percussion: its musical material is closely related to Broken Symmetry, although unlike that work it is mostly slow and brooding.  The final part, Metamorphoses, for chorus and orchestra, sets a text derived from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, describing the philosophy of Pythagoras: ‘Nothing in the whole world endures unchanged…everything is renewed’ From this comes the title of the whole work.

Intrada is the shortest of the four parts, lasting some 8 minutes only.  A sombre introduction is followed by distant trumpet fanfares and a still centre of chorale-like chords.  The development of this material is much more energetic, and the return of the trumpets is wild and violent.  A further short but forceful development section leads to a coda in which the trumpets are superimposed over the chorale chords.

Threnody follows without a break, and although its dense string textures are in complete contrast to the preceding part, its material centres on the note C sharp (one semitone above middle C) which had been prepared in Intrada.  (In Broken Symmetry this focus on C sharp will become obsessive).  The music is very static and intense, but from after its half-way point (it lasts around 11 minutes) gradually relaxes and dies away in gentle homage to Takemitsu. 

Broken Symmetry was designed as a scherzo, but its structure is complex.  Its first half consists of three scherzo sections and three ‘trios’ (after an introduction the first trio precedes the first scherzo).  There is a frenetic centre to the work, and then the first half is recapitulated in reverse.  But it is not a mirror image, as the symmetry is broken, and the scherzos and trios contract, collide and distort, becoming virtually unrecognisable in the process.  The imagery is perhaps that of a machine going out of control, and when it has reached its fastest and most extreme, it collapses, and the mechanism very quickly runs down. 

The all-persuasive C sharp of Broken Symmetry drops down a semitone to underpin Metamorphosis with deep pedal C.  To follow such a manic scherzo with anything other than a mood of reflection seemed impossible, and though the textures are often complex, the music is hushed throughout, and for the most part tranquil.  This culminates in a gentle coda for the chorus (‘cernis et emensas in lucem tendere noctes’), before a postlude which is rooted to the C of the opening: as if an echo of all that has gone before, though hugely simplified.