The first movement Chocolate Hills explores an unearthly but colourful image of enormous hills turned brown from the dry season and located in the Phillipines.ξ The second movement Socotra focuses on an area of Yemen so remote and with a climate so unforgiving it is amazing any species can survive there at all, and yet the image I based my music upon is bursting with life including dragon's blood trees, Socotra sunbirds and legless lizards. The third movement Moeraki Boulders takes us to a beach in New Zealand to ponder the ghostly appearance of clusters of spherical rocks formed several million years ago; while the final movement Stone Forest ends our musical journey imagining an area in China in which vast stalagmite-like formations rise from the ground and create the appearance of petrified trees.ξξ
