Naresh Sohal (18 September 1939–30 April 2018) was one of the most distinctive musical voices of his generation. Born in pre-Partition India in 1939, he lived most of his life in the UK. He was a versatile and prolific composer who, over the course of a lifetime, produced over eighty works, ranging from immense orchestral works to innovative chamber pieces while also encompassing the genres of music theatre, TV documentary, feature films and ballet.

His music was performed by artists and orchestras of international standing, including the BBC Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the Israel Philharmonic and the Berlin Staatskapelle orchestras. He received at least seven commissions from the BBC, two of which were for major Proms pieces. In 1987, the Indian government awarded him a Padma Shree (Order of the Lotus) for his services to Western music.

The two works featured in this CD come from Sohal’s third decade as a professional composer and are among his most compelling. They reveal a stylistic change in his music in keeping with the rise of various kinds of neo-Romanticism in several parts of the Western world from the late 1960s. The shift is evident from the composer’s use of tonal motivic material; standard orchestral forces for evocative effects, and a less stringent harmonic language than that found in his works from the late 1960s, when his idiom was more closely aligned with those of the avant-garde.

The Concerto for Violin and Orchestra was composed in 1986, during Sohal’s stay in Scotland which began in 1983 and ended in 1994. It was first performed on 24 October 1992 by soloist Xue Wei with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins. In Lila, Sohal returned directly to Indian philosophy for inspiration. Sohal enlightens: ‘Lila is a Sanskrit word meaning the play of Nature in its latent and extant forms. According to Indian philosophy this interplay is cyclical in nature. The realisation of a work of art is an example of lila in action, because from nothing, something is brought forth: the latent is potentised so that it enters the realm of the immanent. However, the process whereby the artist achieves this actualisation is a process of sublimation, whereby s/he realises that which is latent within him/her. This, too, is lila.’