Play-pen a wonder of excellence, eccentricity
Music takes us where no words sound. Words take us where music cannot go. Together they provide the experiences, the insights, which give the world meaning and us such ineffable pleasure.
The combination is the sugar rush of aesthetics, the caffeine of creativity, the alcohol of art. Sometimes, however, the two are uneasy partners. To coin an original cliche´ , ‘‘There is no such thing as a free lunch.’’ We have to work at listening to either.
In combination, we need to work even harder, learning the codes, the patterns, the styles, and the purposes for which the sounds are being uttered. The paradox is that the newer the material, the harder we need to listen and apply our experience, but without the new, without change, music and words become, like Latin, a dead language, no longer reflecting our current world, limited to restating our past.
When two modern composers like Hoadley and Jennings present a programme like this one, it is an experience like no other – because there has been no other. It was a wonder of excellence and eccentricity, of style and beauty, of the new emerging from long traditions in the listening arts.
In fact, the opening work, written by Jennings, was developed on a very traditional foundation of Prelude and Fugue, a Chaconne which danced its delightful way into a new corpus of movement inspiring sound, and Variations which exploded out of the more sedate Pand F like a shower of fireworks. When Jennings refigured Shakespeare’s classic As You Like It speech –
Stage with her sensitively interpretive