Tombeau des Vies Manquées

After finishing the overture Ciudad de los Malditos the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I was commemorated with great public attention. It put me in that frame of mind to write a memorial to the staggering number of ‘wasted lives’ that wars leave behind – mostly young lives whose future was aborted by acts of barbarism that one not usually associates with civilisation. Ravel’s ‘Tombeau de Couperin’, and a sense that ‘tombeau’ sounds more like a memorial than ‘tomb’, prompted the French title…

For reasons I still don’t fathom myself, the slow movement of Mozart’s serenade for winds K 361 came to mind and once it took centre stage I realised how young Mozart was when he wrote it. Think about why anybody would want to cut short a life of such promise! Come to think of it – as I write this, another act of barbarism just took place in Peshawar when the Taliban, in cold blood, entered a school and shot dead more than 132 pupils and 9 staff taking exams, which, in their screwed-up ideology, is of course tantamount to committing a cardinal sin. Not long afterwards France woke up to a similar act of mindless savagery in the name of Allah. Wasted lives keep piling up all around us.

Gunfire and meditation, the opening bars of the Last Post and pumped-up anger towards the end, shape the music, which to date is possibly the most traditional I have written – accidentally or deliberately, who knows.