Orbiting the Light
Creative Direction / Producer / Programming
The world turns and everything changes. The light, the heat, the hope, the music.
With ensembles reconfiguring around the audience, seven short encounters chart the daily contest between light and night.
Blazing afternoon heat gives way to a twilight feast of possibility. An evening spent dancing with time itself is capped by a midnight walk home amidst Oxford’s towering spires. A chaos-craving candle fights against the night, its watcher longing for the stability of dawn. When light finally arrives, it does so initially with pearlescent fragility, then with unstoppable tidal force.
Newly commissioned poems by Charlie Lee-Potter intertwine with music by Samuel Barber, Joaquin Turina, Mozart, Grace Evangeline Mason, Matthew Hindson, Camille Pepin and Aulis Sallinen.
“Orbiting the Light, created by Sinfonia Smith Square’s #ConcertLab, is another of their gloriously imaginative feasts . . . Each section of the programme is introduced by a specially commissioned poem, written and read by poet Charlie Lee-Potter. So attentive are the poems to patterns of sound and rhythm that each feels like a short musical composition in itself . . . A magical night.”
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First performance date: 2025
My role: Concept, programming, production
Part of Southbank Sinfonia’s #ConcertLab series
Venue: St John’s Smith Square, London
Poetry: Charlie Lee-Potter
Conductor: Antoine Veillerette
