While Exhortation and Kohima, commissioned for the Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall in 2003, projects a serenity hardly to be found in The Second Coming, setting as it does the famous lines from Laurence Binyon’s For the Fallen – ‘They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old’ – it is nevertheless characterized by harmonic unpredictability. The first section, which one might, from the combination of accidentals to be seen, initially assume to be in G minor, in fact cadences exclusively on D major and B flat, which confers upon the music a curiously weightless quality; the second section is in what one might describe as a mode centred on E major/minor, fading into the silence of eternity by means of a descending sequence of held chords.
from notes by Ivan Moody © 2004
