Jonathan Harvey’s epic mystical masterpiece Bhakti (1982) will be presented by Maxime Pascal and Le Balcon at the Singer-Polignac Festival on 8 June, where they are in residence. The performance will be streamed live on Medici.tv – details here.
Bhakti is scored for fifteen players and quadraphonic tape. It is cast in 12 movements, and lasts around 50 minutes. A quotation from the Rig Veda is appended to the end of each of its movements – Sanskrit hymns written four thousand years ago. “They are keys to a transcendent consciousness”, Harvey writes; its title means “devotion”. The tape element of the work consists of sounds drawn the instrumental ensemble transformed and mixed by computer. In the piece it has numerous functions: dialogue, transformation, memory, anticipation, ‘simultaneous translation’ and of reaching beyond the instrumental scale to a more universal dimension. As Tom Service noted of Bhakti in the Guardian: “technology is a way of extending the reach of acoustic instruments into other realms of space and time, to literally and metaphorically go beyond physical boundaries”.
Commissioned by IRCAM, Bhakti was previously performed by Le Balcon and Pascal in 2019 at their titular festival at the Théâtre de l'Athénée, Paris. A modern classic, its exponents have included Ensemble intercontemporain, London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Modern, Remix Ensemble, Ictus, and Nieuw Ensemble.
In March 2024 the work, a capstone of Harvey’s output, received its 100th performance from a chamber orchestra of students who had taken part in 2022’s inaugural New Music for Young Performers Course held at the Music Academy in Bydgoszcz, Poland. They toured the work under the direction of Szymon Bywalec, to venues in Warsaw, Bydgoszcz and Łódz.