On 2 August Jessica Gethin conducts the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra in Jessica Curry’s An Early Harvest at the Adelaide Festival. It appears as part of the Press Play programme – a showcase of iconic videogame soundtracks performed for the first time by the ASO.
An Early Harvest is a 5 ½ -minute excerpt from Curry’s BAFTA-award winning music for Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, the elegiac, haunting adventure game set rural Shropshire. Her music for it draws on the pastoral, nostalgic ideal of an England that never existed, playing on the Englishness of Vaughan Williams and Elgar. Curry described her process of composing the soundtrack to the game in the Guardian in 2015; listen to An Early Harvest here.
In 2022 Curry’s music from Dear Esther and So Let Us Melt was the climax of the first-ever concert of videogame soundtracks presented at the BBC Proms, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Robert Ames. The Telegraph noted that her music “drove the audience wild”. Her celebrated videogame scores have also been taken up in recent seasons by the London Mozart Players and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.