Ancient Mariner: Not an Opera

Three of our postgraduate composers have worked with Welsh artist Ivor Davies to create an immersive, sound-led performance which will premiere at National Museum Cardiff this week.

Earlier this year, one of our lunchtime concerts at the Museum saw the premiere of works of postgraduate students inspired by the major retrospective Silent Explosion: Ivor Davies and Destruction in Art (National Museum Cardiff, November 2015 – March 2016).

Davies subsequently asked three of the students – Joseph Hillyard, Julia E. Howell and Richard McReynolds – to join him and young visual art composer Leona Jones to participate in Ancient Mariner: Not an Opera.

The performance, part of the Coleridge in Wales Festival, will premiere on Tuesday 17^th May at 2pm in National Museum Cardiff. Entry is free.

Taking Coleridge’s evocative ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ as inspiration, this project mixes audio and visual art forms to explore the essence of the poem.

Discussing the performance, Davies said: “This joint composition has been specially created, visually and musically, for the lofty spaces of the Museum’s great Entrance Hall with its complex echoing acoustics, with musicians and singers placed and moving at every level up to the dome.

“It is total art – uniting the senses, crossing genres and using display and performance in time and space.”

Performers will include current postgraduate students Benjamin Atkinson and Alessandra Palidda, and recent alumna Kate Willetts.

The composers tell us more about the performance over on our Research Blog.