Leviathan (album)

These recordings were made during my 4-year composer residency with Orchestra Wellington. Whiel I'm grafteful to many wonderful conductors around the world, Marc Taddei has been the champion of my orchestral music. Programming it at every opportunity and bringing my most important works for orchestra to countless concert audiences and, thanks to SOUNZ Films, to the wider world.

‍Orchestra Wellington received a sizeable bequest just before I started my residency with them in 2021. I was moved to hear in a meeting with Marc and the orchestra's Chief executive, Beckie Lockhart, that they wanted to use this financial opportunity on a legacy project. And that a recording was a perfect fit for this. They then proposed we record four of my concerti during the course of the residency, which we did.

It was a high-pressure experience for the orchestral musicians and especially for the soloists, all but one of whom had travelled long-distance to record and perform with the orchestra.

It almost felt like Fabian and Luca (The All-Seeing Sky), Alexej (Leviathan) and Adam (Call of the Wild)stepped off the plane and found themselves in front of the recording microphones. It wasn't quite like that, but it was very intense.

An interesting learn from the whole experience was that fusing the recording and rehearsing processes resulted in performances prepared with more detail. I think the performances were stronger than they might have been because we also recorded in the build up to the concerts.

Yoshi's recording of Djinn was different because the performance was cancelled at the last minute due to Covid. It meant we had the entire rehearsal and performance schedule to record the work. This was closer to a 'normal' recording experience.

The Radio New Zealand crew recorded everything and I mixed and edited with Graham Kennedy.

This is a big production, a counter-weight to the 2005 View from Olympus album (also conducted by Marc), which has three earlier concerti (View from Olympus, Three Psalms, and Omnifenix)