Programme Note

When I was a little girl, I used to play in the garden. There, among fruit-laden trees, my sister and I studied every detail of our realm. Insects, flowers, horses and grasses illustrated every corner forever, like a tapestry. Down to the forest, down to the river, through the looking glass… The tigers were tiny, the wineberries were sour, and the faeries would play tricks on you. Meanwhile… in another time and space, the Golden Woman stands brazen and shining in the centre of The Garden. Neither dead nor alive, she embeds herself into the brambles, quiet and still. The nature that surrounds her appears as if it were basking in daylight, while the sky remains an eternal black starry night. She is mute, but her wisdom emanates through tales and symbols. They say that children have a natural affinity with the parallel realms of magic—a timeless secret that can never be told. Do you dare to ask where it went hiding in you, after all these years?

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‘The Garden’ has long been an incubating idea for an orchestral work. It is a place that has lingered at the edges of my awareness for as long as I can remember—an ethereal realm suspended outside time and space. It arrives in fleeting glimpses, neither memory nor dream, but something deeper: a haunting, nostalgic echo of an eternal place that compels a sense of longing to return. I’ve come to call it ‘The Garden’, and though I speak of it mostly to myself, it has quietly nourished the roots of all my artistic creations. Musically, The Garden is a surreal, folkloric journey through this realm, where textures shift like light through leaves, and nature’s sounds—wind, birdsong, rain—breathe through a stirring harmonic landscape around central motifs, recurring like familiar memories. Influenced by composers like Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Bartók, and the whimsical magic of film scores by Frank Churchill and Walter Schumann, The Garden is meant to remind us that this place—this feeling—lives within us. I wanted the piece to capture the ethereal but also trigger a subconscious nostalgia and child-like awe, for the mystery and grandiosity of nature that we experience vividly as children. The Garden is all around us, inside of us. It represents our deepest connection to our nature and eternal truth. One need only pause to remember.

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For commission enquires contact Briar at briarprastiti@gmail.com