While the cellist Laura van der Heijden was searching for images to inspire her and pianist Jâms Coleman’s second album, she stumbled across the work of British artist William Thomas Horton. Born in 1864, Horton’s mostly black-and-white line drawings are minimal in style yet highly evocative, bridging a gap between charmingly simple and vaguely unnerving. “I was actually drawn to three images,” Van der Heijden tells Apple Music Classical. “There’s one of a big wave and one of two cliffs with a tiny gap in the middle. And then there’s The Path to the Moon.” The Path to the Moon brings together arrangements inspired both by night-time and moonlight, such as Debussy’s piano work “Clair de lune”, Florence Price’s song Night and the aria “Schönste Nacht” from Korngold’s operetta Die stumme Serenade. But there’s Britten’s Cello Sonata, too, composed soon after the first man-made objects struck the Moon, and the magical, late Cello Sonata by Debussy, a piece that originally bore the subtitle “Pierrot angry with the moon”. “Horton’s image gave us the artistic freedom to make all these various connections,” explains Van der Heijden. “You obviously want to stick to your idea, but you also want it to be a bit of a listening experience. It’s kind of like designing a menu: you want a bit of acidity, but you also want a bit of sweetness, roundness, earthiness. So, we have the Moon, but also this idea of the exploration of something bigger than all of us, and how, throughout history, people have projected onto the Moon their own stories, ideas and myths.” Another of the major works on Path to the Moon is George Walker’s Cello Sonata, a superb but unfairly neglected 20th-century modernist piece that forms part of Van der Heijden and Coleman’s own exploration of the unknown. “Walker was the first African American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize,” says Coleman, “so, in a way, he achieved mainstream establishment and acceptance. But then somehow his music has still been kind of squashed.” So, this is a welcome return for the Sonata by a composer that Van der Heijden first encountered while playing with the award-winning ensemble Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective. “I’ve played his Lyric for Strings, which is really luscious and can perhaps be compared to the Barber Adagio in terms of feeling and vibe and tone,” she says, “and also the Movements for Cello and Orchestra which is very modernistic. The Cello Sonata sits beautifully in between those two, and weaves in and out of modernism and Romanticism.” Coleman agrees: “It’s a fantastic piece. There’s blues and jazz, and there’s a hint of atonalism music from the Second Viennese School—it’s bold harmonic writing.” For Van der Heijden, Britten’s Cello Sonata is the piece that most resonates with the album’s theme. “There’s a scientific, mechanical element to it underpinned by this incredible heart and intensity of emotion,” she says, “and I feel like there is this really strong pairing of intentions. It really takes you on a journey. And I love that each movement has just such a distinct flavour.” “Each of the five movements is its kind of own self-contained philosophy and world,” adds Coleman, “but somehow, still, he manages to create this kind of through-composed emotional experience. There is a kind of narrative arc through the whole piece.” Equally fizzing with originality is Debussy’s Cello Sonata, conceived during the First World War, just three years before the composer’s death. “In the 1910s, the world was ablaze,” says Coleman, “but Paris was the centre of Europe in terms of art, dance…everything. It was this hugely creative time. We normally think of Debussy as an Impressionist composer, but here he is being bold and brave, and kind of modern.” Arrangements of music by Tōru Takemitsu and Nina Simone are two of the three pieces that form Path to the Moon’s coda. Takemitsu’s “Will tomorrow, I wonder, be cloudy or clear” is beautifully straightforward in its innocence, and is far removed from the composer’s usual post-Impressionist style. “We felt it could sprinkle a bit of that hopefulness and a sense of looking to tomorrow—and add something a little different,” says Van der Heijden. Nina Simone, she adds, brings a sense of absurdity to her classic song “Everyone’s gone to the moon”. “The way she speaks over her playing and ‘speak sings’ is just so powerful,” she adds. “We wanted to do justice to her piano playing and just represent the piece in a more classical way, to highlight the piano arrangement she made.” We finish, under the shimmering moonlight, with Debussy’s “Clair de lune”—a fitting end to this imaginative and rewarding night-time journey.