The Symphony was commissioned by the BBC for the 2000 Proms with the stirring brief of "rendering the twentieth century in music".  Maybe the idea was that, as a practising producer of stylistic hommages, I'd come up with a jeu d'esprit — "Symphony of two thousand".  In fact I took the commission to heart, with deadly seriousness, rose with traumatic difficulty to the impossible challenge in its most extensive and searching interpretation, with a monumental work that indeed traverses the tragic terrain, using materials of its own making gradually welded into a lingua franca, to end after two black World Wars separated by a scarlet scherzo, then an ice-blue Cold War, on a note of muted hopeful green.