Reflect
Ticketing packages:
This event is included in the following package/s:
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Performers:
Soloist // Timothy Young – Piano
Four Winds Festival Orchestra
The individual artists drawn together from across the nation to form the Festival Orchestra will be announced early next year – comprising our nation’s finest talents, the makeup of this group can be subject to change at any time. -
Repertoire:
Nature of Daylight – Max Richter
Fólk fær andlit (People get Faces) – Hildur Guðnadóttir
Grass – Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson
Reflect
Featuring Timothy Young
“Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work — I am the grass; I cover all.”
These words of Pulitzer poet Carl Sandburg in 1918 reveal thoughts on the futility of war and its associated senseless deaths. Almost 40 years later and only in his mid-20s, American composer Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson embraced this poem while watching many Black Americans shipped off to fight in the Korean War, inspiring a new work, Grass. This piano tour de force takes a leaf from Stravinsky as much as from the composer’s broad artistic interests that led him to perform with the likes of drummer Max Roach, Marvin Gaye and the famed Alvin Ailey Dance Company.
Interested in a ‘piece of music being a place to think’ Max Richter’s achingly beautiful Nature of Daylight responds to the 2003 Iraq War. This work resonates equally with globally-acclaimed film composer Hildur Guðnadóttir’s Fólk fær andlit (People get Faces), in which he writes to the mistreatment and deportations of refugees in Iceland in 2015.
Through these works we pause to contemplate how music expresses and illuminates aspects of humanitarian plight in a global sense and gives voice to those who have suffered mistreatment or disregard for human life.