for solo horn and string orchestra

Ross Edwards

Aria and Transcendental Dance for solo horn and string orchestra was composed especially for the Australian horn player Hector McDonald and the Rantos Collegium. It was commissioned by the Blue Mountains Festival with assistance from the Australia Council.

Ross Edwards has described the work as follows:

In composing Aria and Transcendental Dance I was probably trying to reconcile a need for self-expression with the sense of timelessness and contemplation I'd cultivated in much of my earlier work.

The 'aria' with which the work opens is a dramatic horn monologue whose thematic substance is ideally suited to development along symphonic lines. The illusion of a symphonic narrative about to unfold is reinforced when the strings enter, establish a climax and resolve it with protracted Mahlerian cadential gestures.

This gentle parody completed, a new plane is introduced by the strings: the drone-based 'transcendental dance', representing eternity and calmly pulsating beneath the horn's increasingly hollow-sounding rhetoric. The dance strenghthens, leading to a full-blooded episode which silences the horn. There is no final resolution, however, and the work ends abruptly and mysteriously like a chorus of cicadas.