Sunday night saw the premiere of Mason’s new orchestral work at The BBC Proms to critical acclaim. ‘The Imagined Forest’ was co-commissioned with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic for performance under their new chief conductor, Domingo Hindoyan to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Royal Albert Hall.
‘The Imagined Forest’ (2021) for orchestra is a fantastical journey through a space that appears to be a familiar impression of nature, but simultaneously somewhere entirely unknown. The forest, a place rooted in fairy tales, fantasy and folklore, often represents areas of refuge, danger, transformation, and adventure. Recognising the forest as an ethereal and intangible entity, the piece seeks to momentarily transport the listener somewhere intimate and yet, surreal.
The piece is inspired by the work of Clare Celeste Börsch, a Berlin-based artist who uses collage techniques to build imagined worlds filled with foliage and fauna. Bringing together thousands of delicate hand cut paper images, she creates intricate and immersive spaces to transform ordinary rooms into magical forests. ‘The Imagined Forest’ travels through the musical space by interweaving atmospheric textures and fragmentary melodic lines as a collage of fleeting images, just like the artwork upon which it is inspired. The music follows a voyage through the forest with moments of florid energy marked by tumbling, intervallic passages enacting the liveliness of nature itself, contrasted with large interludes of static stillness embodying expansive clearings. The central musical theme wanders through the piece towards enclosed glades where it pauses, as if it is interspersed with shimmering light from the canopies above and the dreamlike dances from the elements of nature; the orchestra glistens with sparkly interjections. Both music and art are fascinating in that countless people can all be experiencing the same work at once and yet, through the lens of their own influence, encounter a completely different artwork. This piece is therefore not a prescriptive experience but is instead a fictional journey; whether it is blooming with flora, captivated by colour, or an airy garden darkened by storm, it is the forest of your own imagination.
The piece ends as it begins, with a solo trumpet playing a single note. By the end, however, even though we hear the same note as at the start, the impact of nature in the intervening period means that, even if you are leaving the same way you entered, you can be intangibly changed by your encounter with the forest.
“Grace-Evangeline Mason’s The Imagined Forest was drawn with pen-and-ink precision and filled with vivid orchestral colour...Glittering surfaces gave way to music of greater emotional power as we drew deeper into the forest. The young British composer, 26, is a name to watch.”
“Mason skilfully shapes her attractive material to ensure we experience the sense of a transforming encounter with the imaginary forest.”
“Mason is a supreme painter in sound. Straight from the gossamer opening, it was clear that this evocation of enchantment would be sonically seductive; Mason also has a fine grasp of structure however, so what we got was a satisfying 11 minutes or so in which vivid impressions of Nature herself...The match of emotion and intellect with highly skilful orchestration in Mason’s piece is a winning one. A most memorable work.”
“Vivid images of a wooded landscape with birdsong were inescapable, prompted, surely, by the sylvan magic of the opening commission shared by the BBC and the RLPO, Grace-Evangeline Mason’s The Imagined Forest...I certainly want to hear more of this composer.”
