Tarik O'Regan: A Celestial Map of the Sky

Tarik O'Regan's title work A Celestial Map of the Sky, here performed by a children's and youth choir with the Hallé, is a vibrant composition with propulsive, syncopated rhythms contrasting darker moments of reflection. The piece is inspired by two woodcuts engraved by German polymath Albrecht Dürer in 1515, which are amongst the oldest known printed European star charts of the northern and southern celestial hemispheres.

A deep-rooted interest in North African traditional music, shaped in part by Tarik’s Algerian heritage, is integrated into two of the orchestral works on this album, which are infl uenced by and named after Algerian folk music forms: Raï and Chaâbi.

First heard at the BBC Proms, Latent Manifest is an ingenious expansion of a single gesture from a Bach violin sonata, magnified to create an entire universe of orchestral colour. To close the album, Fragments from Heart of Darkness is a compelling orchestral reworking of thematic material from O'Regan's chamber opera Heart of Darkness, and is based on the novel of the same name by Joseph Conrad.