8 July 2024
Salento, Italy

The sky is so different from East and West. As the world becomes more globalised and homogenised (though I’d venture to say that the one of the pandemic’s few good consequences has been to un-do this trend), places look more and more like, it’s rather incredible that the thing that actually is entirely the same ends up looking so very different. The hazy yellows, burnt reds, the washed-out evening lights and heavy morning mist is nowhere to be found past a certain point on the rapidly turning globe, somewhere between the Himalayas and the Arabian peninsula where things turn clear, blue, and rather ‘primary’. That’s not to say that life is more exciting on the other side, just that when we all look to the stars, not even the positions, but even the prism, are the same.

That is all a long introduction into a question on my mind recently, that of how the cultural context matters when we listen to music- the same music is clearly not the same to different audiences, and even with people moving around, festival curation becoming increasingly convergent, where we hear (and how) is always different. I’d say, even for musicians performing, the context of a work and their own geography in performing or recording it. Bringing Vivacissimo (2023) to Europe this autumn, and likewise, the European premiere of The Once and Future (2021) in Antwerp, Belgium next spring, will mean a very different interpretation of those works will happen from the audience’s perspective, and perhaps from the performers’ side as well. In fact, the developments in the latter project, including a completely new costume using the highest-tech materials as part of an incubation residency at Science Park Hong Kong, as well as new staging by my colleague Giorgio Biancorosso, will mean it should look truly quite different even to my own, seasoned eyes.

I am also one season away from the European tour and re-prise of En vertu de… (2021), finally, after many years of waiting and the opera’s premiere during some very difficult circumstances during the pandemic at the European Parliament in Luxembourg. Five or six years later is also a matter of a changed sky, new contexts, and a new reality in Europe (if not globally). Among positives and negatives, wars and political setbacks, that piece’s central focus on the essentiality of human rights is itself an idealistic paean to the fact that, wherever we see it from, the sky really is all the same, and somewhere far up there- blue.