PREMIERE OF 'THE GREAT DARK' AT QUEEN ELIZABETH HALL | MONDAY 10 JUNE 2013
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Hannah's really looking forward to the first performance of 'The Great Dark' on Monday 10 June with members of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Foyles Future Firsts.
Book tickets here!
The piece takes its title from the poem by Martin Carter, a Guyanese political activist and one of the leading Caribbean writers of the 20th Century. The piece is presented in three movements, focusing on different ideas derived from cosmology and Caribbean folklore in the text.{C}The opening section, the great dark, as the name suggests, immediately establishes a broad and menacing atmosphere, exploring the connection between the Sun and the orbiting Earth and Moon. This gives way to the delicate and still middle section, the probability of the spirit, which conjures a sense of desolation and solitude. The final movement, the ever weaving weaver, depicts Anansi, the spider god and trickster of the planets as according to Caribbean myth. The fast-moving and kinetic music characterises the strength and power of his tangling web.
The Great Dark
as the moon an earth, a man a mind.
And life is not a matter of a mother only.
It is also a question of the probability of the spirit,
strength of the web of the ever weaving weaver
I know not how to speak of, caught as I am
in the great dark of the bright connection of words.
And the linked power of love holds the restless wind
even though the sky shudders, and life orbits
around time, around death, it holds the restless wind
as each might hold each other, as each might hold each other.
Martin Carter (1927-97)