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London, South Bank Centre: Bryars's ‘From Egil's Saga’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2005

Robert Stein
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Extract

Once again Gavin Bryars confounds many of our expectations with his laid-back take on the world's dramas. The War in Heaven (1992) featured a serene counter-tenor and is anything but bellicose. In The Sinking of the Titanic (1969), performed as a companion-piece in this concert, Bryars's band appropriately plays on undisturbed by the ship sundering all around it. The central drama of Dr Ox's Experiment (1997) is one of celebrating stasis. And so it is that Bryars's latest work From Egil's Saga (2004), a setting of battle-hardened texts by the 13th-century Icelandic poet and warrior Snorri Sturuson, has that calm, quiet, lamenting detachment – ‘a portrait of Egil at the end of his days’, as the composer has characterized it. Once again the world is seen through a piece of interestingly darkened glass.

Type
FIRST PERFORMANCES
Information
Tempo , Volume 59 , Issue 232 , April 2005 , pp. 79
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2005

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