On 25 February Ensemble 10:10 – the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s new music group – perform Tansy Davies’ Dune of Footprints at the Tung Auditorium, conducted by Clark Rundell.
A 15-minute work for string orchestra, Dune of Footprints is inspired by Davies’ visits to the Cave of Niaux in southwest France. “I became transfixed by the changing structure of the ripples and mounds of the compressed sand and rock under my feet”, she recalls. “I thought about some of the flows of energy that had shaped the dune we walked on; the natural force of water over aeons of time, and the rhythm of human footfall over thousands of years.”
The work reimagines this journey through tunnels of slowly shifting harmony, with new spaces sought and carved out, just as water creates a path through the rock. Tall galleries open up into moments of equilibrium or stasis; elsewhere sudden cascades plunge down in dark chasms, from which flinty textures emerge. A distant echo of human voices, exploring these vast structures, may be heard within the body of strings.
The cave is a key imaginative locus in Davies’ music. When writing her forthcoming Passion of Mary Magdalene – which premieres at the Barbican Centre with Dunedin Consort and Anna Dennis on 24 March – Davies visited the Grotte de la Sainte-Baume in Provence on numerous occasions as part of her research for the piece; the cave, a pilgrimage site of significance, is where Mary Magdalene reputedly lived for the last decades of her life. A cave was also the setting for Davies’ eponymous 2018 chamber opera. An underworld of spirits, grief, and renewal, it becomes the place where a man – played by tenor Mark Padmore in the world premiere production at London’s Printworks, with London Sinfonietta – searches for his lost daughter.
Dune of Footprints featured on ‘Nature’, the 2021 NMC portrait album devoted to Davies, performed by the Norwegian Radio Orchestra and conducted by Karem Kamensek. Commissioned by Internationale Fredener Musiktage e.V., and funded by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, it premiered with Camerata Fredenin 2017 at the Internationale Fredener Musiktage; its subsequent exponents have included Staatsorchester Darmstadt and Sîan Edwards, Britten Sinfonia (at the 2021 Aldeburgh Festival), and the Auckland Chamber Orchestra.
In 2022 Ensemble 10:10 premiered Davies’ glider, a 9-minute work for bass clarinet and seven instruments, conducted by Clark Rundell, with RLPO clarinettist Ausiàs Morant as soloist. In 2023 the group performed Davies’ ensemble work inside out 2 – a 6-minute work weaving together short, brittle sonorities with more sustained softer ones into a tapestry of broken patterns, cycles, and grooves. In 2019, Rundell and 10:10 were joined by saxophonist Rob Buckland for Iris (2004), Davies’ 14-minute work for soprano saxophone and fifteen players, in which the solo takes on the role of shaman - “one who walks between the worlds”, traversing different levels of reality and consciousness as the piece unfolds.