John Metcalfe - Tree [LP]

"John Metcalfe - the Durutti Column viola-playing master who for years has been a composer and arranger for the likes of U2, Coldplay, Peter Gabriel and Blur, as well as co-founder with Tony Wilson of the Factory Classical label - had been composing music spontaneously, instinctively, when the idea of Tree arrived. An album that immerses the listener in twenty-four hours of the life of nature's most majestic creations, it came from a desire in John to write at scale - perhaps a natural reaction for a composer writing out of the silences and solitude of our recent pandemic years. "The pieces I was writing were big and trying to be bigger, so I knew they had to be to do with something - and then I thought about one of the most profound experiences of my life." We begin at the start of a cycle, tracking the progress of light through a day into a night. We are in a very special place. Quivering violins rise and build, and we hear the energy of tissue carrying water from roots to stems to leaves. Then we catch magical explosions of birdsong, sense fluttering movement under starlight, and feel the burrowing resonances of roots, as lower strings, oboe and bassoon take instruments made from natural materials back into the earth - and take us with them.