This Gresham College lecture explores whether music is a fleeting illusion—or the key to understanding the mind itself.
Epic. Profound. Otherworldly. Bowler, Ligeti and Richard Strauss
New music by Laura Bowler preludes Ligeti’s ethereal, dreamlike sound world and Richard Strauss’ colossal, awe-inspiring homage to Nietzsche.
The Music
Laura Bowler is a composer of rare imagination and theatrical flair. Her new work for voice and orchestra is inspired by Booker– and Nobel Prize–winning author Han Kang’s The White Book – a poetic meditation on colour, grief and the human spirit.
Lontano was used to mesmerising, claustrophobic effect in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and achieves its ethereal, eerie atmosphere by the continual layering and merging of textures and melodies.
The final work is Strauss’ powerful Nietzschian tone-poem that begins with classical music’s most famous and blazing portrayals of sunrise.
The Performers
A much-admired champion of contemporary music, Barbara Hannigan is vocal soloist for Laura Bowler’s new work, alongside rising conducting star Bar Avni, and then leads the LSO herself in Ligeti’s ground-breaking masterpiece and Strauss’ orchestral epic.
