Despite its actual meaning, the composer recalled in the score program note, "As a young music student, however my imagination construed a very different image — that of a giant 18th-century wedding-cake-rocket, commandeered by the great Baron Von Münchausen, and its marvelous journey to the heavens and back.
It was this image that excited me when I was asked to write a work for the Mannheim Orchestra: I knew I had to recreate the rocket of my young imagination and travel with it through its adventures.
"[1][2] The music thus opens with a quote from the Symphony in E-flat by Johann Stamitz, who was one of the originators of the "Mannheim rocket."
Edward Seckerson of Gramophone wrote, "This 10-minute crowd-pleaser takes the 18th-century concept of a rising scale or arpeggio propelled faster, louder and higher into space, and turns it into something which might easily have emanated from the imagination of Baron Munchausen and found favour with Gerard Hoffnung."
He added, "This rocket-propelled wedding-cake climbs through 200 years of German music: Stamitz, Brahms, Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel, Wagner's Valkyries… and, more contentiously, the Mastersingers.