Another exceptional album from Tim Garland, this time taking its inspiration from the Lake District's majestic land and waterscapes – Ambleside, Black Crag, Tarn Hows and Kirkstone Pass. Though recorded with a 35-piece orchestra (some tracks are with an eight-piece string section), and given its broad, sweeping programmatic intent, this is a surprisingly intimate album. A leitmotif running through the album, as Wayne Shorter might put it, like a golden thread, is the north England folksong ‘The Snows They Melt the Soonest’, which hovers over the music, sometimes in variation, sometimes with melodic fragments surfacing and disappearing as the music unfolds, with its subtle implications of modal harmony. Garland's soprano saxophone is frequently the leading voice, inhabiting the music and governing its moods, while pianists Jason Rebello and Pablo Held are exemplary in respecting the composer's intent with their improvisations, yet often lending animation to passages with sustained strings or adding pointillistic details within the overall stories Garland is weaving.