Plane Sailing was commissioned by The Riot Ensemble for their innaugral concert on 17 Juune 2012. It was premiered by soprano Celeste Cronje, and then recorded for Coviello Contemporary at Deutschlandfunk Köln in 2019 with soprano Sarah Dacey.
The instrumentation exactly matches that of
Song Offerings (by Jonathan Harvey) and this work is dedicated to him. The piece sets the words from Sasha Dugdale’s poem
Plane Sailing (Alzheimer’s) for A.W. Both the poem and the piece are a collection of motifs that spin around the central images of calmness, circling, and grief:
She too surveyed the calm, and was concerned:
What to make of all the signs, for the sea is rarely blank.
And there was a circling, a moment returned
When daughter was mother, and there the sun shrunk.
