- Forces (whole work)
- 2 flutes (II doubling piccolo), 2 oboes (II doubling cor anglais), 2 clarinets in B♭, 2 bassoons (II doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets in B♭, 2 trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion (2), strings
- Duration
- 11 minutes 45 seconds
- Difficulty
- Within reach of a good amateur orchestra
- Status
- Available
- Materials
- Conductor's score on A3 (or Tabloid) · parts on A4 (or Letter) · playback render
Programme note
Cannock Chase, the Churnet Valley, the National Forest.
The suite begins without a clear pulse: low strings in bare harmonics, violins on the fingerboard, and the first bird calls emerging from the woodwind out of nothing. Light gathers; a muted horn offers the chorale's opening phrase and receives no reply; a slow march establishes itself, and at its centre comes the broad theme of the wild deer.
The horn tries the chorale again, and this time something answers. The march breaks off, the beat changes from four to six, and the movement becomes a chase. What answers is a hunting call: the deer's own theme turned upside down, falling where the deer climbs, and hidden in the middle of it are the same six notes the muted horn had played into silence.
The call will not change key. Whatever the orchestra does around it, it comes back in G on the same eleven notes, while the chase climbs away from it in minor thirds until the two grind against each other. Stopped horns call from a distance and are answered from further off. The deer's theme is heard low and alone: it has heard them. Then the quietest passage in the movement, and the most dangerous — the strings strike the string with the wood of the bow, a single horn calls, and nothing replies. The birds of the opening come back at speed and at the top of the orchestra, four calls at once and each in a different key, which is the sound of a forest emptying. The calls close in until they are a beat apart, the four keys of the chase are hammered out together as one chord, and everything stops.
The deer gets away. Its theme is heard high, quiet and quite unaccompanied for the first time in the movement, and it has escaped into D minor. The gallop dies out beneath it, the beat returns to four, and the music returns to the stillness it came from and ends unresolved.