The first movement of Three Winter Scenes, this is my latest reworking of this piece. It was originally called Winter Sunset, then Frozen Landscape, then finally incorporated into TWS as Solstice. Done in Sonar 8.5, with Garritan, EW Gold, Vienna sp ed 1, Cinematic Strings, Dimension Pro and TTS-1 synthesizers. The piece started as a musical representation of a poem I wrote in my twenties. Then I worked in some imagery portraying the solstice. So it's kind of an interweaving of two streams, one methodical (the first part, meant to portray time slowly ticking down to the moment of the solstice); the other more expressive (the imagery from the poem, which was about the cold beauty of a winter sunset, as well as feelings of loneliness and longing).
http://composers.boards.n...d/3/music-presentation
 

To give this a fair listen I did download it and prior to making any comment I listened to the whole piece through twice, with a coffee in between listens.
 
The first thing that struck me was that the first movement is very biased to the left channel which as an orchestral piece I can understand.  This did reappear again throughout the piece perhaps a slight narrowing of the sound stage might help this.
 
All though you captured much of the intended mood and the recording sounded nicely balanced tonally, for me there was not enough movement in the piece it seemed to, for want of a better word, plod a little.
 
Thanks for sharing.

Thanks Wookie for your detailed comment (and listening twice - I took up nearly 20 minutes of your time - sorry about that, my pieces do tend to be long). I'll have to think about the bias issue you're noting, and try some narrowing.
 
As for it being rather plodding, you're right, and that is mostly intentional. The first part is literally intended to suggest a clock ticking down to the moment of the solstice. then there is a pause (the word solstice means pause - the sun pauses before reversing its apparent direction of movement day to day, as it heads toward the vernal equinox, and Spring). After the pause, it does become more expressive and emotional (hopefully).
 
I've considered putting a warning on this music: you may not want to drive or operate machinery for awhile after to listening to this piece. I sometimes fall asleep in my chair listening to it. Makes mixing a challenge...