A Violence of Gifts, Mark Bowden’s ambitious new piece, takes inspiration from the latest scientific findings about the origins of the universe. Paired with Haydn’s Creation and Holst’s The Planets in concert it should be a mind-blowing evening
This is fascinating: Mark Bowden’s new work for the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, which premieres this Saturday 18 April, is a potentially mind-blowing, cosmic-consciousness expanding, and explosively ambitious contemporary cantata that meditates upon the origins of all things. A Violence of Gifts, scored for orchestra, chorus, baritone and soprano soloist is a collaboration with the poet Owen Sheers that bears witness to a creative process inspired by everything from Haydn’s The Creation and Holst’s The Planets to Bowden and Sheers’s visit to CERN and the latest thinking on quantum and cosmic space-time.
The work’s magnificently redolent title comes from Sheers’s text, referring to the theory that the earth and moon are the results of a gigantic, violent collision between two planetary bodies early in the solar system’s history. As Bowden tells Wales Arts Review, it is the product of years of collaboration, of deep thought about how music might respond, represent, dramatise and reflect the most exciting scientific discoveries of our time. Appropriately, the piece is on a large scale – probably around 40 minutes when Martyn Brabbins conducts it at St David’s Hall, and so will be more than an equivalent counterweight to The Planets in the concert’s second half.
Continue reading...
