Song of a Red Sprite: composed for the London Symphony Orchestra

'Song of a Red Sprite' was composed for the London Symphony Orchestra as part of the LSO Panufnik Composers Scheme 2020-22. A 3.5 minute was workshopped on 31st March 2022 (LSO St. Luke's) and it was subsequently expanded to 8 minutes.

Programme note by Tim Rutherford-Johnson:

"A red sprite is a rare optical phenomenon of the upper atmosphere associated with thunderstorms. Alien in appearance, red sprites are the product of lightning-like electrical discharges and appear in flashes up to fifty miles above the earth in the startling forms of glowing crimson jellyfish or jagged, branching figures. Although something like them has been reported for centuries, sprites were only formally discovered in 1989. They have since been observed many times, from the ground, from aeroplanes and from the International Space Station.

Appropriately for their ethereal, supernatural appearance, sprites are named after the elf-like creatures of European mythology (such as Ariel or Puck), and in his Song of a Red Sprite Patrick John Jones gives voice to the atmospheric sprite who hovers in the sky, materialising occasionally to survey the storms below. The work begins ‘nocturnal with heavy air and electrical crackle’ as clouds of string and wind air sounds billow around a portentously descending chromatic bassline. Cutting across this thunderhead are jagged, pointillistic countermelodies, an irregular rhythmic ostinato and atmospheric shivers and sizzles. As these move around at unexpected speeds and across a wide instrumental palette the sprite may be heard to flash and flicker in hidden corners of the orchestra’s sonority."