Terence Charlston will give the world première of Hugh Collins Rice’s Four Abstracts (2021) for clavichord as part of the opening recital series at the new de Jager auditorium at Trinity College, Oxford.
Hugh Collins Rice says about his pieces: ‘The title Four Abstracts invokes the relationship between abstract visual art and music, and the practice of giving pictorial titles to (abstract) musical compositions. The four movements – Glacier (Prelude), Six Lines (Fuga), Connected Forms (Siciliano), Scorpio (Fantasia) – are named after abstract works, or rather series of works, by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. The relationship between abstract art and music is intriguingly close. Music’s ability to create a world of non-representational expression influenced many artists from Kandinsky to Barns-Graham. The Four Abstracts take ideas of shape, proportion, line and colour from the Barns-Graham pictures, but are also abstract musical compositions, with subtitles that could come from any keyboard work written during the era of the clavichord’s flourishing.’ Not to be missed!