You’ll get sucked in!
Composer Maria Antal tells DIANE PARKES about how her latest work was inspired by black holes and Professor Stephen Hawking
WHEN composer Maria Antal was commissioned to write a new piece of music to be premiered at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, she found inspiration from what may seem an unlikely source – Professor Stephen Hawking.
Yet Maria discovered many similarities between the concepts of infinity, spacetime and singularity and those of music. Her work, Event Horizon, will receive its world premiere in Birmingham on October 15, performed by Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Yuri Simonov, who personally commissioned the new work.
Being given such a blank canvas can be at once liberating and overwhelming, says Maria.
“I was reading Stephen Hawking’s ‘A Brief History of Time’ and realising that I was absolutely hooked on it,” Maria says. “It was unquestionable for me that my new composition would be a reflection of the knowledge I had just discovered for myself. So when Maestro Simonov asked what the title of my new opus was going to be, I just opened the book and there it was – Event Horizon.
“The event horizon is the boundary of a black hole. It can only be crossed once – there is no return from the black hole and nothing, not even light, can escape it.
“That is a powerful image. We all have event horizons ahead of us and so often we cross those lines and get to points of no return. This concept was just the initial spark, however. I truly fell in love with cosmology, quantum physics, with Stephen Hawking’s brain, with the sheer ambition of someone figuring out the universe.
“The concepts I was reading about resonated with the way I feel music operates. The idea of spacetime is almost intuitive for a musician to understand as music itself operates in different dimensions – we have melodic, harmonic and rhythmic (and many other) dimensions happening simultaneously in time.”
Maria’s enthusiasm for space has been shared by many this year as the world has celebrated the 50th anniversary of the moon landings and glimpsed inside a black hole for the first time in images taken by the Event Horizon Telescope.
“Looking at those pictures is both humbling and inspiring if you consider that Stephen Hawking figured it all out simply by using his imagination and mathematical equations,” says Maria.
Born in Moscow, Maria studied at the Gnessin Institute before moving to Budapest to study at the Bartók College and Ferenc Liszt Music Academy. It was in Budapest that she first met Simonov.
“Because I’m of Russian/ Hungarian origin I speak both languages really well, so when Maestro Yuri Simonov came to the Liszt Academy to give his first conducting masterclass there, I was the obvious choice for an interpreter.
“Simonov’s knowledge and personality were like a magnet for me and since I interpreted for him a lot, we became good friends. I suppose he is my musical godfather. I not only ask but also listen to his advice but never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that one day he would ask me to compose a piece for him.
“I still can’t believe it to be honest. For the first two or three weeks I was in a state of creative shock because Maestro Simonov said ‘Why don’t you write something like Shostakovich’s Festival Overture?’
“Who can do that? And Maestro knew Shostakovich! Who can live up to these expectations? And yet I wanted to do well – this is Maestro Simonov, the Moscow Philharmonic, it’s Symphony Hall, Birmingham!
“And that is where the synchronicity of me reading Hawking’s book with such fascination was such a godsend. It took care of the huge mental problem of whether I could deliver this – it wasn’t about me any more but something far bigger and transcendent. From then on it was a hugely enjoyable creative journey.”
In 2000 after marrying conductor Jonathan Brett, whom she met at one of Simonov’s masterclasses, Maria and her then three-year-old daughter Karolina moved to the UK. The combination of broad musical interests with classical training has allowed Maria to pursue a diverse career as a composer, encompassing everything from jingles to film scores and concert works for choirs and symphony orchestras. But this will be her first concert at Symphony Hall.
“Colleagues say that Symphony Hall is one of the best halls in England but I have never been – not even to Birmingham. It was a bucket list thing to tick off but to tick it off in such a spectacular way is really something special.”
Maria’s work will be performed alongside Tchaikovsky’s 1st piano concerto and Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony.
“I really hope that the audience will get hooked on Event Horizon, either through the music or the science – or both,’’ she says.
‘‘It is going to hit them really fast. But I hope they will explore more of what they hear and as long as they listen consciously, the possibility of new discoveries is infinite.”
■ Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Yuri Simonov, play Antal, Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich on October 15. Book online at www.thsh.co.uk or call 0121 780 3333.