Dogs and Wolves

Dogs and Wolves (2005) takes its title from the great poem of that name by the Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean, in his majesterial English version. The poem is a headlong hurtle through the mountainous landscape of the poet’s imagination, the traditional poetic image of the hunt expressing the search for the ever-elusive beauty and truth of poetic expression - ‘the white deer of your beloved beauty’; with such imagery the work can also be read as a love-poem, or rather as a poem about the impossibility of holding onto ‘eternal’ love.

I admit that it was this poem’s breathless curve (from the initial chase, through the brief glimpse of the idyllic quarry to the resumption of the tormenting restlessness of the hunt) that suggested to me a single-span orchestral piece. Nonetheless, at the same time this shape, though clearly suggested by the poem, was already with me from my earlier Cors de chasse (2004), where its attraction was the challenge of retaining dramatic impetus while controlling the gradual slackening of pace.

There are five phases to the ‘Dogs and Wolves’ narrative: it begins with a restless babble of fanfares that climb towards a plateau, before a soloistic challenge emerges from a kind of folk band. There follows a series of several ‘Blues’, brief sections in which other smaller ensembles – led off by a pair of trombones - unwind improvisatory lines over a moving bass. An exuberant climax to the last of these yields to an unwinding of tensions by means of overlapping harmonies that unfold downwards, in different chamber groupings, to a glimpse of stillness. This fleeting place of serenity is soon supplanted by the resumption of rapid pace and kaleidoscopic colour - the eternal restlessness.

Dogs and Wolves was commissioned by BBC Radio 3 for the first season of City Halls, Glasgow, and was premiered there, by the BBC Scottish SO conducted by Martyn Brabbins, in 2006.

Piers Hellawell 2024