Output details

Gaudete

This is an example of an original composition sharing new insights. Drawing inspiration from Ted Hughes’s visionary book of the same name, it was commissioned by the BBC and premiered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Edward Gardner with Susanna Andersson (soprano solo) at the Royal Albert Hall on 10 August 2008 as part of the BBC Proms. A live recording of this performance was broadcast on Radio 3 on 15 August 2008.

The researcher writes: '[Hughes’s Gaudete] passes through a series of different states and modes of expression, from the hallucinatory prose-poem of the Prologue, through the interconnected narrative poems of the text’s main body, to the Epilogue, which consists of a short prose introduction followed by forty-five short poems – some of the most abstract and dense in Hughes’s entire oeuvre. … Their power lies in the ability to communicate, through sudden and powerful images that confront the reader with shocking clarity, the most profound, surprising and elemental propositions: the paradox of man’s synonymy with, and separateness from, nature; the Pantheistic equivalence of nature and God; the necessary violent acts of birth and death, their distinctions blurred into a single, continuous cosmic event … Before beginning work on the piece, I spent several months periodically re-reading and studying the book, finally selecting eight texts, all but one of which are taken from the Epilogue ... I considered several possible configurations before the musical and poetic flow dictated the current form, and I have not ruled out the possibility that this sequence may be added to at some point in the future … One thing I can say, however, is that I cannot imagine the final text “I said goodbye to earth” being anything other than a closing statement: it is by far the longest text setting and its ‘otherness’ from the rest of the piece should be palpable to the listener.'