As part of the 2022 edition of Festival Présences, l’Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France will present the French premiere of Jonathan Harvey’s Timepieces for orchestra.
The mutable nature of time – a continual fascination for Harvey – is explored in this extraordinary three-part work from 1987, in which two conductors beat different tempi (in this performance Brad Lubman and Edo Frenkel). The groups of instruments linked to each conductor are not fixed; on the contrary, they are constantly reforming – stretching and reconfiguring the listener’s sense of time passing. Writing about the 15-minute work, Harvey said: “Different time-worlds co-exist and have a relation to each other, just as we exist in individual consciousness, yet pass through the consciousness of others, more or less transparently.”
Full details of Festival Présences (which this year focuses on the music of Tristan Murail) can be found here. Listen to the Gramophone Award-winning recording of Timepieces by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ilan Volkov and Stefan Solyom here.