smaca, judge for yourself - the full score of
Spiriti is online
here.
Got to say, having had a first detailed peer through it, although there are some occasional poorly scored moments that are difficult for the sake of it (e.g. exposed 2nd trom beat in run in bar 68 - were I an MD, this would go onto baritone without a moment's hesitation), there is nothing in that that stands out to either my eye or internal ear as being markedly harder than anything found in
St. Magnus. The overall difficulty - maybe putting the whole thing together in one go end to end could be a bit more tricky. Or maybe a bit less tricky. More or less about the same, I would have said. Some sections are certainly very hard - e.g. fast exposed counterpoint in 2/4s and 9/16s 37-52 and 213-238 slow solos - but a lot of the material that could be extremely testing is obscured from the ear by fuller band textures. But then, I haven't played the piece either, and mikey.smithy has.
One area in which it is clearly more of an ask than St. M. lies in the musical challenge - for St. M. simply (!) putting every note in the correct place gets you there - it is not a deep piece of music for a listener. This requires more thinking to understand the textures. But that is all to the good for a potential area piece, no? We don't want to encourage players to be technical automatons of limited musical understanding.
mikey.smithy, are you saying it isn't
Spiriti because you know that it's something else, or because you think it an overwhelmingly unlikely choice?