• organ
  • 7 min 45 s

Programme Note

Esperanza is named after Camp Esperanza (Camp Hope), the location of the mission to rescue the thirty‐three miners trapped underground for seventy days in 2010 at the San José Mine in Chile, a rescue that was televised live and was one of the most moving, and inspiring, things I have ever seen. By the most extraordinary coincidence, I had already done a good deal of sketching for this organ piece before this all happened and had determined on a “darkness‐tolight” kind of piece – so the coincidence, as well as my feelings of elation, were both too strong to ignore.

The piece pursues a course from a fairly knotty slow beginning (heralded by a few chords that recur at the very end), full of rising themes (another coincidence – the material had already been sketched before the miners were trapped underground), and reaching a loud climax, the quick, toccata‐like second section bursting vigorously out of the tension which is created at the beginning of the work.

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