United Kingdom Various: Loré Lixenberg (voice), Helen Whitaker (flute), Alison Hughes (clarinet & bass clarinet), Rachel Fryer (keyboards), Lee Westwood (electric guitar), Joe Giddey (cello), Ed Hughes (director). Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, 13.7.2025. (CK)
Ed Hughes – Brilliant Rays of Arrowy Light; Sky Rhythms
Shirley J Thompson – An Hymn to the Evening
Rowland Sutherland – Modes from the Downs
Evelyn Ficarra – What Larks
This captivating concert was part of the Orchestra of Sound and Light’s tour ‘From Felpham to Beachy Head’, from West to East Sussex, funded by Arts Council England. The tour came out of the OSL’s 2024 album Distant Voices, New Worlds – songs inspired by texts that speak to people’s experience of the South Downs at different points in its history. The tour has included schools and colleges in the region, working with young musicians mainly in years 9 and 10 and their teachers; theatre maker Freya Wynn-Jones and the OSL have supported students working collaboratively in groups to create and perform their own music and choreography to Charlotte Smith’s visionary poem Beachy Head. About 25 of these new compositions and dances were premiered in the ten days preceding this concert.
Lest the Orchestra of Sound and Light should sound too grandiose a title for a quintet I should explain that it is an infinitely flexible body, expanding and contracting to suit the demands of the music. It was founded by Ed Hughes, Professor of Composition at the University of Sussex, in 2016 to share the excitement of live music-making and composing with film and other arts through participatory projects ranging from primary schools to major Festival commissions, including performances at the Brighton Festival in 2016 and 2018.
Charlotte Smith’s marvellous poem, published after her death in 1806, stands on the cusp between eighteenth-century neoclassicism and nineteenth-century Romanticism, but belongs to neither: individual, original, its 700+ lines sometimes strike a curiously modern note. Hughes, inspired by the vividness of Smith’s imagery, sets five short extracts under the overall title Brilliant Rays of Arrowy Light – an image early in the poem which presumably provided him with the initial stimulus: an image which he paraphrased equally vividly in the post-performance discussion as photons of light from the rising sun crossing the sea and hitting the cliffs.
As the quintet of musicians began to play, I instantly felt a pricking behind my eyes. As I made clear in my review of the Clarinet Concerto Sky Blue (here), Hughes’s music can be extraordinarily beautiful, without ever seeming to seek to be so. It is not so much a matter of melody, harmony or rhythm – though doubtless all of these are in play – more of a constantly shifting and proliferating texture: complex, airy, glinting, rather like a speeded-up film of living organisms changing and growing. With Loré Lixenberg singing the chosen extracts – her voice another strand in the texture – alongside film of dance interpretations by two groups of students and of stunning South Downs landscapes (Cesca Eaton and Sam Moore), this was an experience whose richness was out of all proportion to its brevity.
Hughes’s Sky Rhythms proved to be another fruitful conjunction of times and modes of expression. He sets words by Marion Robinson, a local resident with sharp social and political awareness and a keen appreciation of the South Downs, written in 1937, and a few characteristic and apposite lines from a poem by William Blake, who lived at Felpham for a while, written in 1800; words and music are accompanied by a beautiful black-and-white film, The Silver Sea, filmed at Bognor Regis in 1935. Hughes’s music was again beguiling; the breaking wavelets turned into sound by gently bubbling woodwind. I can only enumerate the elements of the piece; as with the previous work, I cannot express the overall experience crafted by Hughes, Lixenberg and the players. But I will remember it.
In An Hymn to the Evening Shirley J Thompson (one of the 12 composers commissioned by King Charles III for his Coronation) set a poem with that title by the remarkable Phillis Wheatley, an eighteenth-century contemporary of Charlotte Smith, an African American and a slave from the age of 8. The music was beautiful, faithful to the warm and elevated tone of Wheatley’s poem; Lixenberg’s voice part took the lead role, dramatic and affirmative, with the instruments accompanying her.
One of Charlotte Smith’s sonnets, Composed During a Walk on the Downs, was the inspiration for Rowland Sutherland’s Modes from the Downs, which matches the wide spectrum of emotions in the poem with a range of styles travelling from late baroque to Latin jazz. Far from being gimmicky or showy, this was subtle, attractive and successful (in the words of the programme note) in ‘offering listeners a multifaceted experience that mirrors the rich emotional landscape described in Smith’s poetry’; and, one might add, in reflecting Sutherland’s own breadth of musical sympathies and accomplishments.
All these composers are musicians whose curiosity and collaborative work across the arts make nonsense of traditional critical pigeonholing: it is this that made these performances so stimulating. Evelyn Ficarra, whose What Larks concluded the concert, was no exception. Her punning title (shades of Joe Gargery in Great Expectations) suggested that we were in for something freewheeling. What we got was a lark’s-eye view of the South Downs, communicated to us largely in lark-vocabulary: dark rumblings on clarinet and piano, flickering cello, flutter-tonguing flute, recorded bird-calls, and Lixenberg’s voice – one lark among many – in syllables pilfered (with permission) from poems by Ficarra’s friend and collaborator Valerie Whittington. All rather transporting.
I am looking forward to getting to know all these pieces better from the OSL’s CD; but I feel fortunate in having been able to experience them live and in full multimedia dress. If you like new music that is stimulating (and even beautiful) without being irritatingly modish or iconoclastic, keep an eye out for these composers and performers.
Chris Kettle