Echoes, Inscriptions and Fragments - Shelley and Others, a concert

Echoes, Inscriptions and Fragments - Shelley and Others, a concert by visual artist and musician David Ryan, based on texts from the poems of P. B. Shelley, accompanied by Gianni Trovalusci on the flute with vocals by Cristina Grifone.
This unique event features a cretive response to fragments from Shelley’s poetic oeuvre by a trio of international musicians whose backgrounds straddle various traditions of classical, improvised and experimental music. Epigrams from the Greek Anthology are also featured and interleaved between these Shelley fragments, the latter culminating in an intense monodrama based on fragments from Prometheus Unbound. It aims to explore a dialogue between these works and texts from the perspective of the contemporary, using a range of approaches from the atmospheric to lyrical song-like structures and spoken word.
Shelley’s astonishingly subtle and innovative use of language and nature imagery, his exile in Italy, his political and general humanitarian outlook, serve as an inspiration for these musical approaches. By way of contrast, the ancient epigrams (of course known to Shelley) give us some insight into the origins of Western poetry - from their beginnings in literal memorials, to profound musings on time, memory and the everyday, resulting in a kind of ‘elemental music’. The final piece - an extract from Shelley’s Mont Blanc is a commemoration of the late Julian Sands, an actor with longstanding connections with the Keats-Shelley House in Rome. All of these pieces - conceived by David Ryan - require a concentrated and interactive interplay between the performers in order to create a spontaneous realisation within this very special setting of the Salone of the Keats-Shelley house.
Shelley Fragments 1,2,3 (2023) inc. extracts from Stanzas written near Naples; The Cloud ; A Dirge; Prometheus Unbound
Inscriptions (2002): Epitaph from Athens; Thebes; Night-raven; Plato; Li Ne Venis.
Mont Blanc (2023)
Cristina Grifone, soprano/voice
David Ryan, clarinets, zither, percussion
Gianni Trovalusci, flutes

[@NobinaYesmin]

Awesome