Music of Today: Reef and Desert

Gabriella Smith is a young American composer and environmentalist, whose music has been described as ‘high voltage and wildly imaginative’. Anthozoa, for violin, cello, piano and percussion, is inspired by the vibrant, teeming life of the coral reefs of French Polynesia.

Her compatriot John Luther Adams shares his experience of a very different environment in there is no one, not even the wind. Flutes, percussion, piano and strings evoke ‘the space and solitude, the stillness and light of the desert’ around his home in the US Southwest.