“After the interval we heard the first Cardiff performance of Michael Csanyi-Wills’s Seagull Nebula, which had been given twice before in the orchestra’s ‘Crescendo Tour’ but which the composer – who attended this concert – was hearing for the first time. He had very considerately sent me a copy of the score for advance study, and my initial reading suggested to me a piece in impressionist style, with the strings divided for almost the full duration and decorated with woodwind arabesques in the best Ravel manner. The results on hearing proved to be more pointillist – Seurat rather than Monet – with bare textures which were more suited to the medium of space which the programme, describing a space traveller approaching, passing through and receding from the nebula, described in the composer’s informative programme notes. The ‘tone poem’ (not so described) had some overtones of Holst (particularly Neptune) and Vaughan Williams (third movement of the Sinfonia Antartica) but the style was decidedly Csanyi-Wills’s own, with the jagged sforzandi in the strings picking out a richly discordant series of chords which framed the rest of the music. The composer’s earlier scores had also displayed a commendable willingness to provide richly melodic themes, but here these were reduced to “wisps of melody” which came and went through the contrapuntal lines of the orchestral writing. The result had a properly unearthly feel which was most effective, and the playing was everything that one could wish. Apparently the quiet cymbal roll which rustled in the ear in the last bars – missing from the full score – had arisen during rehearsals as the result of some bizarre copying mistake – but it was a very beautifully atmospheric touch.”