Ice Flowers was composed in late 2004 for the Nordlys Ensemble, and is inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's celebrated tale The Snow Queen. This story is in fact a collection of seven "stories" (Andersen's word) loosely linked by a sister's quest for her lost brother. As a child I was both deeply impressed and baffled by it, and on re-reading it forty-something years later I noticed that my memory had retained several powerful images (the shattered mirror, the shard entering the boy's eye, the dead maidens floating downstream) while discarding the overall narrative thrust. My composition seeks to dramatise this process of selective memory. Each of its seven sections evokes a short passage from Andersen's text, and use is made of the Danish Christmas carol quoted by Andersen. - Raymond Deane 

THE  SNOW  QUEEN

I: ...till at last it slipped from their hands, fell to the earth, and was broken into millions of pieces.... some of the fragments were not so large as a grain of sand, and they flew about the world into every country.... even the smallest fragment retained the same power which had belonged to the whole mirror.

II: ...Often at midnight she flies through the streets of the town, and looks in at the windows, then the ice freezes on the panes into wonderful shapes...

III: ...Three coffins, in which lay the three beautiful maidens, glided from the thickest part of the forest across the lake. The fire-flies flew lightly over them, like little floating torches... The evening bell tolls their knell.

IV: ...something rushed by her like a shadow on the wall, and then horses with flying manes and thin legs, hunters, ladies and gentlemen on horseback, glided by her, like shadows on the wall.

V: ...The wolves howled and the ravens screamed; while up in the sky quivered red lights like flames of fire.

VI: ...The snow-flakes ran along the ground, and the nearer they came to her, the larger they appeared... they were alive... and had the strangest shapes. Some were like great porcupines, others like twisted serpents..., and some few like little fat bears... but all were dazzlingly white, and all were living snow-flakes.

VII: ...Empty, vast, and cold were the halls of the Snow Queen.