“The White Road is inspired by ceramicist Edmund de Waal’s sequences of single-glazed pots. Suckling has said that the work ‘is not a piece about porcelain, nor a musical evocation of the colour white, but it may be about obsession.’ The work was co-commissioned by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO) and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra for RSNO flautist Katherine Bryan, whom the composer has known since they were teenagers in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. Performing here with the BBC Scottish Symphony, Bryan is sublime, slicing through fragmented cadenzas and revealing a powerful lower range.”