Words and Music: Transformations

Producer Note

Change is the ever-present and familiar thread which runs through and entwines all our lives. In this special edition of edition of Words & Music recorded live at The Sage Gateshead, with readers Jonathan Keeble and Kim Gerard, the transformations range from mundane and grisly, to mythical and mycological.

Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein and Carl Hiaasen’s Rudy Graveline are two doctors involved in altering the human body. But whereas Frankenstein is motivated by the quest to create life, Graveline is an unscrupulous and unqualified plastic surgeon whose final attempt at liposuction goes horribly wrong.

In contrast, Pygmalion’s experiment to make the inanimate live (he’s carved his ideal woman from ivory) is wholly successful. He has the advantage of divine intervention when Venus answers his fervent prayers in Ted Hughes’s vibrant translation of Ovid.

Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself a giant beetle in Franz Kafka’s celebrated story. The metamorphosis precipitates changes in his family, who are initially sympathetic but later become aggressively hostile.

The following three texts trace the effects of drugs on mind and body. Laudanum temporarily transforms Baudelaire’s squalid room into a sensual paradise before wretched reality returns. Next, rejuvenating drugs are taken by two old women. In ‘Awakenings’ the decades roll away for Oliver Sacks’s sleeping-sickness patient Miss R: after taking L-DOPA her past becomes her present as she sings lewd songs from her party-going youth. But George has even more spectacular results when his repulsive grandma takes his homemade pharmaceutical concoction (in Roald Dahl’s ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine’) which sends her literally through the roof.

Sylvia Plath’s ‘Mushrooms’ implacably change their surroundings, while Gerard Manley Hopkins and Alan Bennett mourn the impact of man on familiar and well-loved environments. Mechanical and technological change has both challenged and enriched mankind down the ages. Two hundred years ago it spawned the Luddite movement, when textile workers smashed mechanical looms in a doomed attempt to safeguard their livelihoods. ‘General Ludd’s Triumph’ is a rousing call to action, full of revolutionary rhetoric. The tension between the evils and benefits of technology is the subject of Rilke’s ‘The Machine’ from the 1920s; in the first decade of this century it struck a chord with Don Paterson who made this reworking of the original. New technology in the form of the internet takes Andrew Crumey’s Mr Mee down an unexpected path.

Simon Gray reflects on ageing with self-deprecating splenetic glee and, finally, a change in relationships: the bitter humour of Dorothy Nimmo’s ‘Ill-Wishing Him’ is the other side of the coin of the all-changing love of John Donne’s ‘The Good-Morrow’

Music is provided by soprano Stephanie Corley, pianist Kate Thompson and players from Northern Sinfonia. As well as ‘General Ludd’s Triumph’, Stephanie Corley sings a love song by Richard Strauss to reflect the end result of Pygmalion’s carving and also takes the role of Miss R, singing a lewd song from the 1920s, ‘Big Boy!’

Northern Sinfonia and Kate Thompson play chamber music including the wistful Adagio mesto from the Brahms Horn Trio to herald Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sadness at the destruction of some well-loved trees. The finale of Poulenc’s Sextet for piano and wind begins perkily with Mr Mee’s web surfing but leads to Simon Gray’s honest reflection on old age more with its strangely peaceful ending. The relentless ticking of the clock from a Shostakovich quartet brings the unwelcome return of time and reality to Baudelaire.

On their own, the wind players get a chance to shine in two virtuosic movements from Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles, the first reflecting Roald Dahl’s anarchic humour; the second, the mysterious atmosphere of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Mushrooms’. Saint-Saëns’s ‘Tortoises’ dance a can-can after Simon Gray’s geriatric grumbles and the blood of Rudy Graveline’s unfortunate patient spurts to the rhythm of Bernard Herrmann’s score from ‘Psycho’.

Our journey of change begins and ends with Schoenberg’s ‘Verklärte Nacht’ – Transfigured Night – which begins with dark foreboding before Dr Frankenstein gets to work and ends in ecstatic radiance after John Donne’s love poem ‘The Good-Morrow’. We hope you enjoy it!

David Papp & Clara Nissen (producers)