New Works String Orchestra 3 / Various - New Works String Orchestra 3 [CD]

When Yodit Tekle was diagnosed with stomach cancer in late 2014, her partner, Martin Anderson, who runs Toccata Classics, asked a few composer friends to write some music for strings to bring her comfort in her illness. As her life slipped away, he had the idea that she might be remembered in music and so he began to commission other pieces for string orchestra in her memory. To his surprise, almost everyone he asked generously agreed, and so the project snowballed: there are now over 100 composers who have now written or agreed to write for it - in an undertaking that is probably unique in the history of music. This third volume presents eleven more pieces in an initiative which, in effect, transforms love into something you can hear. Under the guidance of Paul Mann, who is coordinating this project as well as conducting it, the young players of the Ukrainian Festival really took this music to their hearts and produced performances of real intensity. Another point of interest: Yodit was from Eritrea, and so in these days when the classical world is worried that it might be appealing largely to a white, middle-class elderly male audience, here is a sequence of new classical works composed for a young black woman from north-east Africa.