Music x Museums

The V&A exhibition Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear celebrates the power, artistry and diversity of masculine attire and appearance, organised into three areas: Undressed, Overdressed and Redressed. These aspects are reflected in three contrasting pieces for orchestra, and several arias featuring a countertenor – a male voice that occupies a range now associated with female singers.
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While several of these countertenor roles were written for castrati, the aria ‘Siam prossimi al porto’ from Handel’s Rinaldo originally featured a contralto (low-voiced female) playing a man. Gender roles are flipped again in this performance by world-renowned countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński.
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Lully’s overture to Le Bourgeois gentilhomme sets the scene for Molière’s play – a satire of social-climbing middle classes and snobbish aristocracy of Louis XIV's France, for whom flamboyance and vanity ruled supreme.

Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte is a modern redressing of the 18th-century Classical minuet and trio.
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Stravinsky’s Apollo stepped away from early 20th-century modernist excess to create an undressed, stripped-back neoclassical style. It is paired here with a cast of the Apollo Belvedere that is displayed in the V&A's Fashioning Masculinities exhibition.

The British Library’s exhibition Beethoven: Idealist. Innovator. Icon. features the first editions of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, ‘Pastoral’ and his Choral Fantasy for piano, choir and orchestra, both of which are performed in this programme. A utopian model of inclusion, Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy was intended to bring together all performers (even the soloist) in total unity, for maximum musical effect; while the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony is Beethoven’s monument to nature.

Stephen Hawking’s scientific explorations delved into the nature of time itself and our perceptions of it. For composers, time is the medium through which their works are experienced by performers and audience alike. Bach’s fugues create coherence out of interlocking musical lines, each of which is independent of the others and moving in its own timeframe – yet which make perfect sense in combination. Birtwistle’s Tragoedia combines different groups of instruments to achieve the opposite, with each player in his own temporal world. Terry Riley’s hypnotic 1964 work In C is scored for any number of musicians, and is often cited as the first significant minimalist piece of music. Ordered chaos – not unlike the concept of entropy used so frequently in theoretical physics – is a key component of this piece, which takes shape thanks to the whim of the performers. 53 musical segments, all based on a few notes of the C major scale, are repeated any number of times, each musician moving at their own pace; it is almost wilfully random, yet there are moments of synchronicity and order.

The sea’s ever-changing nature, from destructive turbulence to serenity, has inspired musicians throughout the ages. Elgar’s Sea Pictures for singer and orchestra presents five songs, each a setting of a poem about the sea; the last of these, The Swimmer by Adam Lindsay Gordon, was written in 1870 - the same year the Cutty Sark entered service. This is complemented by Grace Williams' Sea Sketches and Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.