Philharmonia

Four years ago, Gael Cannon left a village music school on the Irish coast to conduct an orchestra in Boston. Now his patron is sending him to Nepal, on an errand that has nothing to do with conducting: find a viol built almost four hundred years ago by Giovanni Maggini, and bring it back. He brings back more than an instrument. The viol is one of five, scattered across the world - and each of them has given itself a body. Ageless, needing neither food nor rest, human to look at, the Incarnations play their instruments as no living musician can. An association has spent decades trying to find all five and gather them around a single score: a last symphony Tchaikovsky is said to have written in secret, and never published. It calls itself Philharmonia. Gael is now one of them. >From a Himalayan glacier to the cliffs of Slieve League: the hunt for five impossible instruments, and for the music they were made to perform.