Winter in Poland

Wrocław in Poland was Breslau in Germany until 1945. We’ve travelled here to record the orchestral parts of the music we’ve written for a ballet, The Most Incredible Thing, which opens at Sadler’s Wells in March. It takes me several days to work out how to pronounce the Polish name of the city. Some foreigners call it ‘Vratslav’ but apparently the correct pronunciation is ‘Vrotswaff’ (I think). Actually no one seems to mind.

We’re recording in the old Große Saal des Polnischen Rundfunks built in Breslau in the Nazi era as a concert hall for radio broadcasts. A team from Berlin has set up hard-drive recording equipment and the English conductor, Dominic Wheeler, is rehearsing the excellent orchestra of young Polish musicians in arrangements by a composer and musician from Dresden, Sven Helbig. It’s a tough schedule: we have over 80 minutes of music to be recorded in three days. The conductor and musicians wear headphones so they can hear a ‘click track’ which enables them to play in time with the electronic music we’ve already recorded.