Brass Band: Festive dance from Mindia Alexander Comitas

Program Notes

During the summer holidays of 2013, while in Georgia for the first time, I chanced upon a number of poems of Vazha Pshavela, an outstanding Georgian poet, born in the second half of the nineteenth century in the Northern Caucasus. I felt immediately attracted to a poem called The Snake Eater (1901), about the tragic fate of its hero Mindia, in the Northern mountainous region of Khevsureti. I started investigating and transcribing Khevsur folk music, which I found to possess the same stark beauty as Pshavela's poem.

I now composed the beginning of what I would like to become a full scale ballet. This Festive Dance is the sixth movement of what I have composed so far. It is a Khevsur dance in honour of Mindia's return. I arranged it for the Cory Band and their conductor Philip Harper as a way to thank them for commissioning me to compose Audita Tremendi, a piece that had been on my wish-list for years.