Year: 2024/25

Instrumentation: Orchestra & Solo Cello

Wind: 3333
Brass: 4331
Timp
3 Perc
Harp
Solo Cello
Strings

Duration: 20:00″

Mvt I: The Pursuit of Fear
Mvt II: Weywot
Mvt III: Bring Me Your Mountains

Performance History: Commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. Premiere at the National Concert Hall Dublin on Friday 30th Jan 2026 by Martin Johnson and NSO Ireland.

About:

Hostile Summits explores three aspects of our relationship with mountains through the lens of the soloist’s relationship with a larger orchestral force.

Mvt I, The Pursuit of Fear, looks at mountains as places to experience thrill, danger, and the rush of vertigo; pinnacles of nature which must be summited and conquered by human effort. During the Victorian era, mountain expeditions became popular among the middle class as a means of experiencing pleasurable fear: a rush of vitality at the proximity of deadly precipices. For bold adventurers they became a proving ground for Victorian ideals of masculinity and character, the overcoming of adversity and obstacle, with those who died in pursuit of this goal becoming romanticized and sensationalised, breaking their bodies upon the unforgiving summits of nature’s harshest environments.

The second movement, Weywot, depicts the mountains of antiquity: locations of divine power and religious significance, the meeting point between earth and heavens. Weywot is a celestial object orbiting one of Neptune’s moons and was named after a sky-god in Tongva mythology, an indigenous American group. This movement draws primarily on the concept of distance, and mountains as the dwelling-place of divine beings, out of reach and unapproachable. The soloist’s material contains an inner contrast between the high and low registers of the cello, which is reflected by the orchestra. There are attempts to bridge the gap, but the distance proves insurmountable, with the last gesture of the movement firmly pushing the soloist back into the earth.

In Mvt III, Bring Me Your Mountains, the embattled soloist emerges with limping strummed chords, bruised from the attempt to scale these heights. The movement is a reflection on the Biblical passage where Christ, after his Transfiguration on the mountain, descends to heal a sick child, and promise his disciples that faith in him, not their effort, will move mountains. The orchestra consoles the soloist with a series of chords that become more majestic as the music progresses, before the opening, unsteady gesture is infused with energy and transformed into a confident, active gesture.

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