Fantasy Variations — From the Scottish Mountains
for orchestra with piano
Listen on YouTube…
Curiously nostalgic Highlands impressions conveyed in a 'retro' idiom…
During my mountain and wilderness walking in the Scottish Highlands there were two distinct and in my view largely incompatible main groups of musical images working in my mind. One gave rise to the 4th Symphony, and is largely of a rather severe and elemental nature. This work uses the other set — of a lyrical and at times nostalgic cast. It was to be my only venture into a sort of neo-romanticism, and had a useful function for me in acknowledging and laying to rest a whole lot of unhelpful bogeys (nostalgia foci), helping to clear my primary compositional focus from those clingy tentacles from the past.
This isn't a simple 'straight' set of variations on a single theme, however, and is really something of a halfway house between the traditional 'variations' form and my organically developing type of symphony.
The work was drawn and expanded (in 1996) from a long improvisatory flute solo I wrote in 1979, and incorporates some further ideas that came to me in 1980. In fact it contains not one but several themes, which repeatedly recur as variations — though pride of place goes to the opening theme, which thus acts as a 'glue', maintaining continuity throughout the work.
In addition, although certain of the variations are discrete with a clear beginning and end, many of them are to greater or lesser degree run together, and some are broken up and combined with other variations of the same or a different theme.
A few quotations from other composers' works have insinuated themselves into the structure — two definite quotations from Mozart's Requiem and one from Beethoven's Violin Concerto, and less precise allusions to moments in Verdi's Requiem and Sibelius' 6th Symphony, and something less defined of Mendelssohn with a stormy Scottish connection.
Why? — All I'll say is that it worked out that way, as part of my natural playfulness in my creativity. However, the listener won't find here the cheap and empty polystyly that has been so fashionable in many works of contemporary music.
A similar and more strongly developed playfulness with quotes and allusions emerges again in my Symphony 5 (Magritte Gallery) — but there we've moved right beyond the more romanticism-associated nature of this work.
Important!
Having used the word 'romanticism' with regard to this work, I could easily be giving a wrong impression of how I mean it to be played.
In fact I still composed this piece as primarily an 'elemental' utterance, despite its apparent 'romantic' / 'post-romantic' sound world. That means that for a conductor to ensure a truly 'faithful' performance of this work, (s)he needs to keep to a sensible minimum any expressive tempo variations that aren't in the score. This work has a lot of drive and flow, and general sense of forward motion. To sully that with a lot of drawing extra attention to expressive details would considerably degrade it.
To be honest, I deplore the way that a high proportion of conductors maul / disfigure even true, overtly romantic or Romantic works generally by using excessive tempo variations. When one does that, the music fails to flow properly, wallowing in various details, taking attention away from the overall form and direction of flow. It draws attention to the conductor, away from the composer's original utterance.
Concert pianists too are particularly guilty of that heinous disfigurement of the compositions they're making out to be 'performing' — indeed no matter whether or not they are 'romantic' works. Most members of an audience may love to hear it that way, but that's because they have so little understanding of how much more effective the work would be if only the performer(s) enabled it to speak / sing for itself without such heavy 'interpretation'.
Also more like one of my symphonies than a traditional set of variations, this work has the sense of travelling on a big journey, which starts in pastoral vein, taking us maybe past hill slopes with cattle and sheep peacefully grazing, then wandering across remote moorlands and among towering mountains, with tremendous storms and moments of seemingly quasi-religious Scottish Highlands ecstasy together with many a little touch of humour along the way.
One particular type of
figuration that recurs several times in the latter half of the work is very suggestive of
the tumbling and bouncing of falling stones and rocks on the mountains. And at the end,
all the wonder, nobility and excitement dies down to the final distant wordless intonation of 'requiem
aeternam' — this time with no Mozart quotation or echo. Must be some confounded private personal reference! 
…Er, well, except that in addition to 'some confounded private personal reference', the sordid truth is that that ending places me squarely back on the Lundavra Road (see the note below), and I now understand that it would have come to me even without any 'confounded private personal reference'!
My understanding now is that I was unawarely picking up a whole complex of memories (probably generally not musical ones) from ghosts that had accumulated along there over the centuries. As would be the case with ghosts generally, along with the straight 'factual' memories were all sorts of emotional attachments and cravings — nostalgias, separation stresses / traumas, longings, and all that derives from the rough and hard life experience of those living out in those somewhat to very remote locations. Undoubtedly the ending of the work reflects just a hint of some historical personal tragedy somewhere in the Lundavra area.
As in the case of my Symphony 4, deeper aspects of my consciousness had apparently acted as 'interpreter' for me, by prompting me with musical ideas that reflected various of those memories and emotional impressions.
And so, when the music finally comes down off the mountains, the relatively low ground there is quietly, eerily, echoing in a musical whisper, Requiem aeternam, requiem aeternam…
.