Program Note:

I composed Boreal in 2010 as a novice composer, still getting to grips with the capabilities of string instruments, including the viola. I was drawn to a certain melancholy of the viola and a sparseness in its sound. The unique C string of course evokes a rich warmth, but the instrument, for me, conjured up a vast sense of space. I wanted to explore the warmth of the viola and all its lyrical possibilities and this feeling of sparseness. I watched Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World. At one point in the film, there are scenes of the most otherworldly undersea footage looking up at sheets of ice and shafts of sunlight beaming down onto the seabed. I thought of this idea of jagged ice, space, and warmth. Boreal moves between these colours, textures, and places like stepping through different fields. Harmonically I was also drawn to the connections between folk string music of Ireland and Nordic countries, the open intervals and grain of the strings evoking the expanse and subsoil of the Tundra.