In the Tithe Barn, as sunlight reaches through the high windows, the grain of the timber and stone feel rich with memory. It was built around 1400 by the monks of Abbotsbury Abbey, but there have been buildings on this land since the 10th century. It’s hard to stand there without sensing the long continuity of human activity.
That sense of memory and history is the starting point for Invisible Waves, one of Sunday’s festival highlights.
The programme takes its title from a solo piano work by Christian Mason called In a World of Invisible Waves: a Butterfly. One of today’s most distinctive British composers, Mason’s music often unfolds through subtle shifts of texture and resonance, emerging, dissolving, and reappearing in new forms. Its imprint deftly connects the concert with music that moves in currents, carrying traces of the past into the present.
The programme spans nearly a thousand years, featuring a sequence of short works, fragments and arrangements written in England across nine centuries – either by a British composer, reimagined by one or composed on these shores. What threads it together is less a historical narrative than an attentiveness to resonance, to recurrence, and the way musical ideas travel across time without quite belonging to any single moment. As Adrian Brendel describes it, the programme “leaps forwards and backwards… surprising us with connections and synergies where we might not expect them.”
Machaut and Bach are reimagined by Birtwistle; Handel emerges briefly before giving way tImogen Holst; pianist and composer Joseph Havlat conjures 9-year-old Mozart’s London debut; the titan of English music Elgar, sits alongside Walton and Purcell. This isn’t a linear history. Each piece is part of a larger, shifting, musical conversation across the ages.
At the very beginning of the programme are fragments of organum, some of the earliest surviving polyphonic music associated with this part of England. Organum begins with a single line of chant, extended into two or more voices moving alongside one another. The effect is spacious and unhurried: perfect for Gareth Lubbe’s unique vocal talents.
It’s not impossible to imagine that something like this might once have been performed by the monks of Abbotsbury Abbey themselves.
