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| David with quartet members Paul, Bruce, Juliet, Helen and concert organiser Francis Knights |
Fabulous
concert ‘The Darwins and Music’ at Darwin College, Cambridge on Saturday 29th October, brilliantly put together by historian of science Edwin Rose and Francis
Knights, head of music at the college. So many
wonderful choices of music to illustrate talks on various Darwin generations,
and great performances by the string quartet, Trinity Street Consort (led by Tammas Slater),
Carola Darwin (soloist) and Marie-Noëlle Kendall (piano).
The quartet (Paul, Bruce, Juliet and Helen) gave the first
public performance of Eyenigma Variations to a capacity audience of ~200 and played
with great spirit and physicality, from the mysterioso beginning (the mystery
of how Evolution could account for The Eye) to the ff feroce (fierce…)
final bars, closing the argument. Given the fabulous other music on offer, from
Cheryl Frances-Hoade and Francis Knights to Chopin and Vaughan-Williams (a
Wedgewood-Darwin), I was delighted with the excellent performance and with the audience
reaction.
I'd taken the opportunity earlier to go round the Darwin Correspondence Project
exhibition at Cambridge University Library (joint sponsors of the concert) to
see absolute gems of letters and communications casting a lovely light on
this most likeable of scientists, the fascinating intellectual web of which he
was the centre and his relations with family and the public (and also the
famous Tree of Life - purloined & returned! - notebooks). I hope I’ve done some justice to the human
aspects that came across in the letters in my ‘Three Soliloquies’ for baritone
and guitar (see Darwiniana tab).
NB: no recording
was possible due to the complexities and multi-strand nature of the concert.
I was lucky enough to attend the recent Darwin concert given in Cambridge at Darwin College, and one of the highlights of the evening was undoubtedly David Gahan’s really enjoyable new quartet (its first performance). This is not only a clever work playing on Darwinian themes, but it is also rather witty. I found the pizzicato section particularly striking. I sat there thinking: “This is pure Ravel”, remembering, of course, his great Quartet in F with its unforgettable pizzicato second movement, 'Assez vif – très rythmé', which is thought to echo the Javanese gamelan. Gahan’s piece was a triumph, beautifully crossing the divide between C. P. Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’. More to the point, the work was entirely relevant to an evening celebration of the Darwin family.
ReplyDeleteEyenigma’s apotheosis at the ‘Darwins and Music’ event (Darwin College, 29 Oct) was a triumph, David, a veritable tour de force. The programme was perfectly formed to position your creation just before the tumultuous Chopin climax, after which an excited audience were returned gently back to the Darwin family with their scion Vaughan Williams. Your modest patron Prof. Ian Brown was justly honoured for his generosity. To me, once an engineer and schoolboy radio ‘ham’, the ‘fiendishly’ difficult work (I meant that as a compliment!) kept darting signals, coding chords that merged into melody, back and forth, never quite leaving the Victorians. I trust this public debut will lead to countless similar performances. Yours expectantly, Jim Moore (biographer of Charles Darwin)
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