Music for Thirteen Solo Strings

For three decades the English composer Nigel Clarke (b. 1960) has worked in close collaboration with the violinist Peter Sheppard Skærved and Longbow, Sheppard Skærved's virtuoso thirteen-member string ensemble. Clarke's engaging and energetic music often takes it's cue from a dramatic or poetic impulse. Here it features two tributes to Edith Cavell, the British nurse shot in the First World War, one for solo violin, the other for the unusual combination of flugelhorn and strings; two of the other works here are musical portraits of the town of Dover, in the south-east of England, with white cliffs made famous in Vera Lynn's wartime song. Nigel Clarke is Visiting Composer to Middle Tennessee State University Bands and has a long engagement with the symphonic wind-band movement in American universities.