A journey through the seasons of a life, written for Mark Padmore CBE, Ben Goldscheider and the London Mozart Players.

THE WORK

Wild Earth Blazing began with a question: what would the opposite of Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Stringssound like? Where Britten's masterpiece inhabits darkness and the night, Hudson's 42-minute response turns toward light, new growth and the sensory beauty of the natural world.

Commissioned by the JAM Festival with a libretto by poet Esme Lloyd, the work traces the full cycle of the seasons: from ‘frozen ground’ and ‘filigree cobwebs’ through the ‘electric birth’ of spring, the ‘gorgeous violence of summer’, to autumn's ‘gentle decay’. Throughout, a single question returns: Do you remember it yet?

The piece was conceived deliberately for an American composer. It was felt that the historical weight of Britten's Serenade on a British composer might create unconscious echoes and mental blocks. Hudson, who grew up with Copland, Bernstein and Gershwin rather than the Britten tradition, brought a different musical language to the same forces: one that is nostalgic harmonically, soulful melodically and hopeful in outlook.

‍

THE ARTISTS

The work was written for three exceptional artists: Mark Padmore CBE, one of the most celebrated tenors of his generation, whose voice acts as the primary narrator, the memory of seasons; Ben Goldscheider, BBC Young Musician of the Year 2016, whose horn becomes the personality speaking outside of itself; and the London Mozart Players, one of the UK's most distinguished chamber orchestras, who together with piano and percussion paint a vast canvas of orchestral colour.

The tenor and horn mirror each other throughout: one remembering, the other feeling. Lloyd's text moves between the intimate and the explosive, from a whisper of frost to wildfire and gorgeous violence, and Hudson's score follows it with colours that shift from muted to blazing and rhythms that pulse from stillness to raw energy.

Wild Earth Blazing premiered at the JAM Festival to a powerful audience response — a 42-minute journey through the seasons of the natural world that is, ultimately, a journey through the seasons of a life.