The Dreamer is a 28 minute work for solo violin and orchestra.
Commissioned by Britten-Pears Arts, BBC Radio 3 and Philharmonie Luxembourg
This work was composed in 2026 and first performed on 20th June 2026 at Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Snape, Suffolk as part of the Aldeburgh Festival by Tamsin Waley-Cohen and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Kevin John Edusei
Instrumentation
Solo violin and Orchestra:
2,2,2,2/ 4,3,3,1/ timp, 2 perc / harp / Strings
As a child, every night when I went to bed, my sister Tamsin would be practicing her violin in the next door room, so the sound of her violin became the setting to my dreams.
The first movement of this violin concerto grows out of the lowest parts of the violin, a dark and slowly swirling melody grows out of diads built around the open strings of the violin. While the violin line follows the melody into it’s upper reaches, the orchestra shifts and transforms around it, until the two come together, bubbling and sparking until they collide with heavy dark chords and spin into a wild fury, out of which the violin emerges, pure and direct.
The second movement is a vocalise or song without words, soft and slow, with the orchestral swirling delicately around the central voice of the violin.
The third movement is an earthy scherzo, a feet in the mud kind of dance, with a visitation from a music box.
The final movement is one big chorale, sometime clock-like, sometimes a looming machine, sometimes a dark and dangerous dance, but always the same 4-part chorale fragmented and transformed. The soloist stands as the individual against the machine, the dreamer against the ticking of time, and the lone dancer in the crowd.
Dreams both night dreams and day dreams and the type of dreams that are often called ‘hopes and dreams’ are the little cracks through which we can peer into our internal worlds. We are all dreamers, especially when we listen to music. We live in our own minds as much as any shared world or collective idea of reality, so ‘The Dreamer’ is the composer, or the performer, or the orchestra or the audience, or all of us.