1 The Menuhin Hall
    Stoke D’Abernon, Surrey (Burrell Foley Fisher 2006)
2 Ronchamp Chapel
    Chapel of Nôtre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, France (Le Corbusier 1955)
3 The East Stand
    Arsenal Stadium, Highbury, London (William Binnie 1936)
4 Grand Central Waltz
    Grand Central Terminal, New York (Reed and Stem 1913)
5 Walt Disney Concert Hall
    Los Angeles, California (Frank Gehry 2003)
6 Fallingwater
    Bear Run, Pennsylvania (Frank Lloyd Wright 1935)
7 The Gherkin
    30, St Mary Axe, London (Norman Foster 2004)

Frozen Music was commissioned by the Yehudi Menuhin School for a gala concert in the newly opened Menuhin Hall; celebrating the 90th Anniversary of Yehudi Menuhin’s birth. The composer took the opportunity to write a set of pieces based on architectural models.

Each of the seven movements evokes a particular piece of architecture. The sharp visual contrasts between the buildings are reflected in abrupt shifts of musical style. The compositional approach to each movement is guided by the techniques used by the architect – for example, in Ronchamp Chapel, the composer borrows proportional relationships from Le Corbusier’s “Modulor” architecture to structure the music.

The first movement is based on the Menuhin Hall itself and presents a phantasmagoria of music closely associated with Yehudi Menuhin and with his school; echoes of Beethoven, Schubert, Strauss and Schoenberg are frozen in time. The extended quotation from Schubert’s Litanei remembers Menuhin’s funeral, when all 29 violinists at the school gave a moving and unforgettable performance of the song.

The whole score is suffused with references, quotations and ciphers which occasionally bubble up to the surface. Fallingwater, for instance, is built from fragments of pieces about rivers and waterfalls. Grand Central Waltz refers to a scene in Terry Gilliam’s film The Fisher King where rush-hour commuters at New York’s Grand Central Terminal suddenly start Waltzing en masse.

The first performance was given on the, 22^nd April 2006, in The Menuhin Hall, Stoke D’Abernon, Surrey, UK. Tom Ellis was the soloist with string players from the Yehudi Menuhin School. The same emsemble gave the first London performance at the Wigmore Hall, on 27^th June 2006. The first U.S. performance was given by guitarist Ricardo Iznaola with members of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, Hamilton Recital Hall, Newman Performing Arts Center, Colorado, USA on 5^th October 2006. Recorded on Frozen Music (© 2007) - a collection of Stephen Goss’s chamber music.