Illusions of Power

Producer Note

How real is power? When is it imagined and when is it true? Who or what has power over us, our actions, our minds, bodies and spirit?

From the might of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana and speeches from at times once extraordinarily powerful Prime Ministers, via the cataclysmic Jonchaies by Xenakis and Black Sabbath’s The Illusion of Power to Durufle’s setting of Gregorian Chant, Tantum Ergo, venerating the power of the Blessed Sacrament, the first five minutes of this sequence of Words and Music presents authority, control, influence and power in many of its forms.

MacDougall’s Gathering is a piobaireachd arranged for viola and bronze age horns, and usually played on bagpipes to gather one of the oldest truly Celtic Clans. An incredibly powerful summoning of clan members from across the highlands around Oban.

The energy of Mosolov’s Iron Foundry is followed by Kit Wright’s Ode to Didcot Power Station. Wright says that if he was going to have an ode, “why not go the whole hog and pull out all the stops with ‘thee’s and ‘thou’s and fairly antiquated language.”

Sibelius stood in his living room looking out over Lake Tuusula watching swans circle his house and which then ‘disappeared into the solar haze like a gleaming silver ribbon’. He transformed their flight and movement into the finale of his fifth symphony. The musicologist Donald Francis Tovey compared the ‘swan theme’ to the Norse god Thor swinging his hammer.

Jennifer Rush’s power ballad, The Power of Love was originally on the playlist for this sequence, however, it just wouldn’t fit, so on the back of the celebration of the power of love in Out of the Shadows we have Percy Grainger’s The Power of Love. Not quite the same, but it certainly does the job.

Moving slowly and brutally from love through the physical violation of Margaret Atwood’s poem to Philip Larkin’s Toads - a study of the power work has over us, and our need to find employment, rather than our desire.

Shostakovich appears twice in the programme. The composer of some of the most despairing music written, he was a man who knew the influence authority and the state could have on a person. The sequence exploring war and nuclear apocalypse is introduced by his 8th Quartet. It is dedicated "to the victims of fascism and war" – some say this is a reference to the victims of totalitarianism, while others suggest the dedication was imposed by the authorities. It has also been reported that Shostakovich thought of the work as his epitaph and that he planned to commit suicide around this time. The programme draws to a close with his last symphony. The final movement is equally as dark as the quartet. Shostakovich was fascinated by time and clocks – his flat in Moscow is still home to many of his clocks. The ticking of the percussion brings the symphony’s ghostly coda to a close. Could the thing that has the greatest power over us be time?

Jeremy Evans (producer)