Diary

Psappha - The University of Manchester Residency 4

Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall, Martin Harris Centre, The University of Manchester

Friday 24 February 2012, 19:30

Anthony Payne's brilliant picture of insect life is the overture to two works in which music becomes theatre. Sally Beamish hinges her lively and expressive music on a dramatic spoken text based on the seven deadly sins, after which Peter Maxwell Davies's great classic takes us reeling into the madness of King George III.

Mayflies live but a day, causing Payne to think about different time scales, from fluttering, buzzing insect activity to cosmic changelessness. Both the other works fix on the middleground of the human lifespan. Beamish's colourful music illustrates and intensifies a narrative by Phil Hind, translating and extending the vision of the seven deadly sins in the medieval allegory Piers Plowman. Music and text bring home how human sinfulness is exactly as it was in the fourteenth century, only more so. Davies's Eight Songs for a Mad King has extravagance written into every pore. The soloist yells, screams, cavorts and, indeed, sings, with the support of instrumentalists who represent his jailer and fellow inhabitants of the prison of his mind.

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