MUSIC

Paul Riley gets friendly with Edward Cowie to discuss the world’s first festival of music (and more) inspired by the natural world.

Ten minutes into a conversation with Edward Cowie, you find your hand heading nervously northwards to see whether an ear might need sewing back on. The unstoppable torrent of ideas and enthusiasms suggest an intellectual metabolism on overdrive. But then he’s got form. To the roll call of day jobs including composer, painter, author, scientist and academic, he’s just added another: festival director. For one action-packed week, Edward Cowie and Bristol are taking a walk on the wild side. Nothing new for either, of course. Zoo to the BBC Natural History Unit, Wildscreen to a recent gorilla fetish, Bristol’s been saying “wild thing I think I love you” for quite some time; for Cowie, his inspiration as both composer and artist has always come from the natural world, which he regards as “the ultimate laboratory of experience, a fabulous region of possibility”. “My own music,” he confesses, “isn’t rooted in other people’s notes, but in the behaviour of the natural world, its rich forms and symmetries. The idea for a festival like Earth Music Bristol has been in my head for decades, but it was coming to St George’s for my piano piece ‘Rutherford’s Lights’ that got the ball rolling. The director of St George’s Suzanne Rolt felt we should go with it, Roger Wright, head of Radio 3, was keen, and with a whole range of people believing in the project, the thing snowballed, creating a unique marriage between Radios 3 and 4, and collaborations right across the city, film and exhibition, talks and a live feed from Slimbridge.”

The creative endorsement of the BBC has been crucial, Rolt suggests: “I’m really excited that Roger Wright has chosen to put it on down here, and invest teams from London for daily live broadcasts over five days. It’s the sort of blanket support usually reserved for something like the Proms, and it’s not just the concerts. They’ve commissioned the likes of Richard Mabey and Helen Dunmore to write and record a week’s worth of The Essay on Radio 3 and Radio 4’s Afternoon Story live during the festival. St George’s is open from 10am every day and I’m hoping that people will come in for the exhibition, maybe stay for a talk or hang on for a concert. There are just so many entry points in what the festival has to offer.”

But it starts with the music, of course, and even there the ‘entry points’ run the gamut of popular-with-a-twist to the adroitly arcane. “Once I’d plotted the symphony orchestra concert,” says Cowie, “I’d got the ocean theme, and from water I moved to birds, so those are the two main strands.” From the big guns of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales with the symphony Vaughan Williams fashioned out of his film music for ‘Scott of the Antarctic’ to a rather more-ish programme of English chamber music, from Radio 3 New Generation Artists the Elias Quartet to the BBC Singers (including a new piece by Cowie himself) and Messiaen pianist par excellence Peter Hill, there’s an enlightening eclecticism abroad. “I narrowed the works’ list down to about a thousand,” laughs Cowie, with no hint of exaggeration. And if ‘The Four Seasons’ raises a crowd-pleasing curtain, period instrument flautist Stephen Preston adds some piquant Vivaldi to the pot before returning later in the week for something very different: a lunchtime concert of improvisation based on his own birdsong-derived theory of ecosonics. The night before, the BBC Concert Orchestra under Barry Wordsworth offers an atmospheric line-up which sets Vaughan Williams’s ‘Lark Ascending’ alongside Milhaud’s jazz-suffused ‘La Creation du Monde’ and Bartok’s magical ‘Music for Strings Percussion and Celeste’. With melting Delius, Honneger, and Ravel, it’s a concert Rolt likes to see as “a sort of tasting menu, an ideal introduction to classical music for people who are maybe interested in the ideas of the festival but are not sure where to start musically.”

In the brochure’s ‘welcome’, Cowie is described as ‘Founder, Artistic Director’. That suggests a festival with legs and not just a one-off. “For sure,” he bats back. “I’m already feeling my way towards the double theme of ‘space and place’ for March 2013. Some people say it’s a rough, tough time to make things happen, but I’m the kind of guy who refuses to sit down and give in. There’s no other festival like this; there’s great fertility for growth. I want to seed new talent and visions, spawn unexpected collaborations. Watch this space.”

Natural wonders

Three Earth Music Bristol highlights

Snow boots on for Vaughan Williams’s Sinfonia Antarctica and salt-sprayed Britten and Elgar. BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Colston Hall, Sun 20.

The rustle of ‘night music’, jazzy creationism and a captivating cuckoo. Barry Wordsworth heads up the BBC Concert Orchestra, Mon 21.

From Wenlock Edge to Spanish monks via Janacek’s ‘Overgrown Path’: Tom Poster, Allan Clayton and the Elias Quartet unite, Tue 22.

EARTH MUSIC BRISTOL RAN (MAINLY) AT ST GEORGE’S FROM 18-26 NOV. FFI: WWW.STGEORGESBRISTOL.CO.UK

Copyright Paul Riley 2011