Out of Dawn’s Mind is a setting, by Edmund Finnis, of five poems by Alice Oswald. It’s scored for soprano (here Ruby Hughes) and string orchestra (here the 17 strong The Manchester Collective; dir: Rakhi Singh). The poems deal with light, water, time and the experience of coming into contact with the world. The feeling is intimate and meditative. The vocal line is high but quite relaxed in tempo. The accompaniment is elegiac with brooding and shimmering patches. It’s rather beautiful but not at all dramatic.
Out of Dawn’s Mind
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I sat down with mezzo-soprano Ema Nikolovska this morning to talk about her upcoming show at Koerner Hall with guitarist Sean Shibe. It’s a touring show that’s being seen in multiple cities across Europe and North America and Ema was very clear that she sees it as an “experience” and “not a song recital”. So let’s take a step back and look at how it came into existence and then evolved into what we will be able to experience later this month. 
Rohinton Mistry’s novel A Fine Balance is a complex, six hundred page long saga about events during the 1975-77 State of Emergency in India. Turning it into a coherent, stageable play is a considerable feat and Anosh Irani has managed that; even if the result is a long evening at the theatre. It’s actually pretty clever. Besides the ruthless elimination of minor characters and sub-plots he handles the principal characters’ back stories by dropping in bits of information all through the narrative that allow the audience to fill in details that are otherwise not made explicit. It’s efficient and effective.
