This album presents three essential works for string orchestra – music that celebrates the ACO’s status not only as one of the world’s finest string ensembles, but also its role as leading commissioners and champions of new music.

The three works on this album share a common thread. They are, in their own unique way, moments of memory. Each work links together a chain of moments as part of a larger continuous work, each expressing a sense of time, place, feeling and humanity. Vasks’s Vox Amoris unfolds as a series of episodic moments, some as gentle as a whisper, others as impassioned and tumultuous as love itself.

Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht paints its moments through poetry and music – a celebration of the power of love and human connection. Listening to Silvestrov’s Moments of Memory (VI) is like opening a shoebox full of cherished memories, personal and powerful, yet fleeting.