The Spindle of Necessity (for trombone, percussion and strings)

Pickard: The Spindle of Necessity, a concerto for trombone, strings and percussion, takes its inspiration from ancient Greece: the myth, included in Plato’s Republic, of a soldier, killed in battle, who returns from the dead to recount his experience of the afterlife and the workings of the cosmos. The Spindle of the title is the shaft of light around which the stars and the planets revolve, pushed around their orbits by the three Fates, the ‘Daughters of Necessity’.
Gramophone: outstanding; BBC Music Magazine: outstanding.