Remains of Elmet

Researchers

• James Whittle

  

  Originally from Woking, James began composing whilst a teenager.

• Victoria Bernath

  

  Victoria Bernath began her musical studies as a child in Canada and subsequently Belgium where she was encouraged to follow a musical career, following award-winning achievements.At the age of 17, she moved to the U.K.

Ted Hughes’s Remains of Elmet, ‘A Pennine Sequence’ (1979), is a poetry collection inspired by photographs by Fay Godwin of the West Yorkshire landscape of his childhood.

Together, the poems and photographs address themes of decay and regeneration: social, physical, and psychological. Setting five poems from the collection, this work gives a theatrical twist to the traditional concerto form. Unconducted, a resonance chamber of wordless voices and a staged block of instrumentalists challenge the dual nature of the mercurial soloist: a viola-vocalist who traces a fragile path through the work’s cyclical development.