Nigel Clarke’s symphony with violin on the desk Vienna 25 8 22
I have just arrived in Vienna, after a wonderful train journey down the Rhine, and then the Danube, from Cologne. I am here to record the wonderful ‘Prophecies of Merlin’, written during the Covid-19 Lockdowns for me by Nigel Clarke. We will meet up with my old friend and collaborator, the truly trail-blazing conductor Neil Thomson, and we will spend the whole week hard at work with the great Austrian Radio Orchestra. Neil and I were both teenage violin students of the most wonderful of English violinists, Ralph Holmes. Ralph died tragically young, but his voice sings on, and I know he’s pleased about what we are going to do this week.
