We live in a fast-paced world, flitting from meeting to meeting, eye on the phone, constantly connected to the wider world. Yet how well are we connected to the real world? To the natural world? How often do we enter a concert hall at the last moment, hastily reminding ourselves who – or what – is playing that evening? But imagine entering a hall and being enveloped in the sound of birdsong, or the sound of deer rutting or ice cracking; something to make you stop and reflect before a note of the live musical performance has even begun. With Nature Unwrapped, Kings Place brings the natural world to your concert hall.
Helen Wallace is about to unveil her fourth season as Programme Director at Kings Place. Although Venus Unwrapped, its flagship 2019 series celebrating the music of female composers, is still firing on all cylinders – Kings Place seasons run in calendar years rather than traditional September-to-July dates – the brochure for next year is about to land. This is the twelfth “Unwrapped” season the venue was presented, so is programming a season around a single theme, I wonder, a constraint or does it inspire her own creative juices?
“It very much fires the creative juices,” she enthuses, “especially when you’re dealing with such a range of genres where you need to find something that’s common to them all. And it also makes the artists that we work with think harder. There’s always a push and pull with programming – artists who come to you with great projects but also people who you you would love to have, and you’d like to fire them up with the topic.”
Cello Unwrapped, her first season, was very much driven by the artists she wanted to engage, but Wallace explains that with Venus, it was very different, focusing on composers, as it is again with Nature. So where did the idea for Nature Unwrapped come from? For Wallace it is both a response to the current call for action on climate change, and a celebration of the inspiration of nature, in all its teeming, fragile, awe-inspiring diversity. “There will be works within the series that are to do with melting ice and rampant consumerism,” she explains, “but I was very keen that we don’t make this an agitprop series. We’re not going to constantly beat people over the head with a piece of music about climate change, because that can be a bit of a zero sum game both artistically and intellectually.”
The idea for the series springs partly from Wallace’s own interest in the natural world. “In another life, I’d have been a biologist,” she admits. “I’ve always had a strong interest in wildlife, walking and gardening. I was brought up in the country between the North and South Downs on the Hampshire-Surrey border. My father collected butterflies and moths, and my sister works for the London Wildlife Trust. I’ve always loved the repertoire that’s connected with nature, from the Pastoral Symphony to Handel's L'allegro, Vaughan Williams' Lark Ascending to Gubaidulina’s Canticle of the Sun through to Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux. This gave me a rich seam as a start to planning the series.”
But Wallace’s programming goes way beyond obvious staples such as the Pastoral. Repertoire was one route, but the other was field recordings, especially the way in which they have fed into contemporary music, a vibrant, vital strand of the season. This is where sound recordist and composer Chris Watson plays a key role, as the season’s Artist-in-Residence. “I’ve always really loved his work,” Wallace begins, “whether as an installation or a radio programme on BBC Radio 3, or his more experimental work as a composer. Lots of people make sound recordings, but his approach is unique. He’s worked on most of Sir David Attenborough’s series and has a huge catalogue to draw on and an imaginative approach to how he puts things together. So when you ask for an environment evoking a coniferous forest awakening in spring, he will create a piece with its own narrative. He doesn’t manipulate it, but he thinks of it as a score.
“Chris is doing a type of sound calendar for us in Hall One. The idea is that before the beginning of each Nature Unwrapped concert, when you go into the hall you will enter a natural environment, taking you into a different world. We open in January with birdlife in The Wash and end in December with the sounds of bearded seals singing and the sound of ice cracking. Chris is brilliant at making you reconnect with sound. We see a lot of wildlife through the screen but we don’t feel it – so the idea is to get people to listen more deeply.”