In Transit - Vixen

BBC Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins Conductor

"Vic Hoyland's energetic and forceful work, In transit, pitches massive orchestral forces against each other; the central mood of the work has been described by the composer as 'a joy in generating energy – making numbers dance'.

The joint inspirations for Vixen are Hoyland's earlier work Fox, an 11th-century Persian philosopher, and the intricate geometries of Muslim architecture. This wide-ranging work for large orchestra contrasts the dark and sensuous orchestral textures of Mahler with exotically Messiaenic percussion."

Vic Hoyland is a composer’s composer. For thirty years he has influenced the thinking of successive generations of students and young professional composers in the UK. He is currently Reader in Composition at Birmingham University. His flawless technical skill and extraordinary ear for sonority is matched by a unique musical and theatrical imagination.
Roger Marsh

The title can be taken in a number of ways: on a surface level, the musicians are split into two roughly equal orchestras, with a centrally-placed percussionist who plays almost continuously throughout the work – although not in a soloistic capacity. Thus the music is sometimes geographically in transit from one orchestra to another, not in the hocket style familiar from modern Dutch composers such as Louis Andriessen, but in such a way that the respective roles of each orchestra can be easily differentiated by the ear.
James Wishart

The gnomic working title of the piece, A-Vixen-A, encapsulated a play on words. First, Hoyland was acknowledging a link to an earlier (1983) ensemble work written for the Endymion Ensemble, called Fox, of which Vixen furthers some of the processes and potential. A-Vixen-A is a kind of transliteration of Avicenna, which is itself the Italian name of a mediaeval Persian scholar normally known as Ibn Sina.
James Wishart