DESCRIPTION:
First movement of UK Composer Daniel Basford's Symphony No.1 for Concert Band, 'Prometheus'.

World Premiere Recording, made in 2014
Hertfordshire Wind Sinfonia, cond. Mark Eager
CD available on ASC Records

Programme Note
This symphony began as pure music; it did not tell a story, nor was that my original intention. A work I was planning to compose after the symphony - a tone poem for wind band on the subject of the well-known story of Prometheus - was making virtually no progress, until I realised that the symphony in fact had some parallels with the story. The symphony is therefore not an exact description of the entire story, but rather a commentary on certain parts of it. The main source of inspiration comes from two poems: Byron's 'Prometheus' and Shelley's epic drama 'Prometheus Unbound'.

From a musical and structural point of view the symphony owes much to English symphonists such as Walton and Elgar but also Bax, a composer whose developmental style I empathised with strongly.

The first movement - the longest of the four - takes the final lines of Shelley's dramatic poem as a starting point:

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, is to be good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

The movement begins with a long bass saxophone solo which then winds itself up into a long passage of fast music. A lyrical melody appearing halfway through perhaps depicts Prometheus' apparent kindness and sympathy towards man. The fast music returns, concluding in a furious coda: Zeus is angry at Prometheus for the theft of fire and his giving it to man.