Divine artistry – the Nightingale and the Violin

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My new violin concerto Nightingale for Harriet Mackenzie and the BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Sora Elisabeth Lee, responds to the Nightingale night series of paintings by contemporary artist Maggi Hambling and will be premiered for the Britten Pears Summer at Snape on Wednesday 26 August.

In writing this new piece I have reflected on how the ‘imagined watch’ of nightingales, music and meaning have soared through the centuries: from ancient Greece where Plato envisions the reincarnated soul of Thamyras as a nightingale, to Oscar Wilde’s beguiling tale of The Nightingale and the Rose - where the bird sings through the night to stain a rose red.

It is this resilience that artist Maggi Hambling evokes in her series of paintings Nightingale night (2023-2024) inspired by a night in the Sussex woods listening to its song with the folk artist Sam Lee. Her exquisite gold and black reaches out to the transience of life and dissolution of the self, described by James Cahill in the book Nightingale night as infused with transcendental vision:

’Hambling has used gold paint - a pigment redolent of Byzantine and early Renaissance icons, in which it signified the divine, as well as islamic and Asian traditions - to represent the epiphany of birdsong. The colour conveys a Biblical sense off revelation…and joy in nature.’

This metaphysical approach also informed my compositional practice as I incorporated sacred texts on birds from Genesis and Song of Songs. Violin and visuals coalesce in a celestial tapestry where the simultaneous physical touch of the bow and brushstrokes on the canvas reveal divine patterns and shapes: palindromic forms, musical murmurations and metamorphoses.

My glowing musical landscape oscillates through the violin’s kaleidoscope of timbre where ever-shifting sul pont, flautando, tremolo and bariolage create an iridescent song declared against the deep orchestral textures of resilience. The lens of synaethesia (where one sense informs another) pervades both art and music.

While Maggi has translated the song of the nightingale into art, I have transformed that back to sound. Maggi’s art is in flux, a flow of resonant deconstruction and burgeoning transformation, described by James Cahill as ‘a kind of synaesthesia, embodying one medium through another.’

My music not only responds synaesthetically to Maggi’s shining gold and dazzling black, but also the imagined colours of my mind’s eye, as the nightingale flies in and out of heavenly realms where (in simple terms) cooler colours are evoked by fourths and fifths harmony and warmer colours through thirds and sixths, pervading all parameters of register, timbre, texture and rhythmic intensity.

Like the nightingale, the violin’s narrative goes back through history with the ‘stringed instrument’ dating back to the Islamic and Byzantine world (thinking of Maggi’s pigment) alongside Western Europe. In the 17th century Heinrich Biber’s Rosary Sonatas demonstrated early connections between art and music where the Passacaglia is accompanied by an image of a guardian angel leading a child, followed by Vivaldi’s Spring from the Four Seasons and Respighi’s The Birds all shimmering with birdsong. Culminating with the famous 1924 duet between cellist Beatrice Harrison and a nightingale, and most recently the expressive music of Sam Lee.

There is an unsaid truth that perhaps only music can reach, as Schopenhauer said ‘…the other arts only speak of shadows, but music speaks of the thing itself’.

Nightingale is the third of a trilogy of violin concertos, all written in response to Maggi Hambling’s art and celebrating over a decade of collaboration between Maggi, myself and the violinist Harriet Mackenzie. The first was Wall of Water, written after Maggi’s series ‘Walls of water’ premiered by Harriet and the English String Orchestra, conducted by Kenneth Woods at LSO St Luke’s in 2014 and the National Gallery in 2015 as Maggi exhibited.

The second was a double concerto, Edge (for violin and harp) premiered by Harriet and Catrin Finch with the Aldeburgh Festival Orchestra, conducted by Jonathan Berman at the 2017 Aldeburgh Festival. Nightingale concludes a narrative that spans from the North Sea in Walls of water, to the melting polar icecaps of Edge, concluding with the spiritual song of this endangered species that flies without borders from Europe to sub-Saharan Africa.

It’s been a privilege to work with artist Maggi Hambling and violinist Harriet Mackenzie over this decade. Maggi’s art continues to be a phenomenal inspiration and Harriet’s beautiful sound a source of vision.

Harriet Mackenzie says: ’This project is so meaningful for me - not only because it draws together two of my lifelong passions, music and art, but because of the incredible collaboration with Deborah and Maggi over the years.

’It has been such a privilege working closely with Deborah and Maggi throughout this process, visiting Maggi’s studios with Deborah in both London and Suffolk and gaining an insight into the paintings. Deborah’s response to Maggi’s work is not a literal translation of the paintings into music, but I feel it is something more instinctive and creative — a musical exploration of their energy, colour, movement and emotional intensity and of course using Deborah’s unique compositional style with her synaesthesia which makes her response so very personal.

’I feel that Deborah really understands my voice as a violinist - she writes so beautifully for me and it has been wonderful to see how these concertos have developed and grown over the years.

’I feel very fortunate to be so involved in this continuing collaboration between composer, artist and performer, and to bring Deborah’s new work to life in a place where the landscape, the visual imagination behind the music and the sound of the orchestra can come together so naturally. It feels like another chapter in a remarkable artistic journey that has unfolded over many years, and I am very excited to share this new concerto with an audience for the first time.’

Deborah Pritchard’s Nightingale will be premiered by Harriet Mackenzie and the BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Sora Elisabeth Lee, on Wednesday 26 August at Summer at Snape, Aldeburgh. It was commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and the Nicholas Boas Charitable Trust.