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- Kevin Volans
This Is How It Is (Version for String Quintet) (2017)
- Chester Music Ltd (World)
Programme Note
This piece was originally the opening song of the third act of my opera The Man with the Footsoles of Wind. The opera is about the last months of Arthur Rimbaud’s life. The song is sung by Djami, Rimbaud’s servant and companion, in an attempt to cheer him up on their journey through a North African desert.
It was Bruce Chatwin who came up with the concept for the opera. Both literally and figuratively, it's about Rimbaud's move to silence: at the peak of his powers he gave up writing and became a trader in North Africa. This time of taciturn wandering fascinated Bruce, as well as the extraordinary circumstances of Rimbaud's death. Bruce was himself mortally ill, and felt that he was not equipped to write a libretto about a great poet, so he passed the task over the young poet Roger Clarke. I completed the composition in 1992, long after Bruce had died, and the English National Opera put it on at the Almeida theatre in 1993.
This arrangement of the song was made in 2017 for the Peace Quartet and Leon Bosch.
Programme note © 2017 Kevin Volans
It was Bruce Chatwin who came up with the concept for the opera. Both literally and figuratively, it's about Rimbaud's move to silence: at the peak of his powers he gave up writing and became a trader in North Africa. This time of taciturn wandering fascinated Bruce, as well as the extraordinary circumstances of Rimbaud's death. Bruce was himself mortally ill, and felt that he was not equipped to write a libretto about a great poet, so he passed the task over the young poet Roger Clarke. I completed the composition in 1992, long after Bruce had died, and the English National Opera put it on at the Almeida theatre in 1993.
This arrangement of the song was made in 2017 for the Peace Quartet and Leon Bosch.
Programme note © 2017 Kevin Volans