THIS EVENT TOOK PLACE ON 17 SEPTEMBER 2024.

Music

Bartók Divertimento for String Orchestra Sz.113 BB.118
John Adams Shaker Loops

Read more about the pieces

Guest speaker

Professor James Sparks

About the concert

The world is at a critical moment of conversation and action around protecting the climate, the natural world and the beings that share our planet.

City of London Sinfonia and Professor James Sparks explore the fundamental patterns of life on this earth, and the beauty and inspirations they enable – through the work of two great musicians, Bartok and Adams.

Bartok was an avid collector of minerals, insects, and plants, with a soft spot for sunflowers and fir cones. His Divertimento springs from his collection, with its complex (and at times frantic!) romantic form bound by simple rules and patterns.

Adams similarly draws inspiration from the natural world, incorporating its beauty, power, and rhythms. His work Shaker Loops combines simple and repeating melodic patterns to create a complex tapestry – a rippling, shimmering texture, evoking ripples across water.

In this first of concert series Patterns of Nature, we invite you to join us for an evening that will reframe these two works and strengthen the desire to protect this planet, and all that it has inspired.

CLS and Prof James Sparks last collaborated in 2018 on Bach and the Cosmos, a concert series that used music for orchestra and voice by JS Bach to explore how maths and music are linked together. The concert series toured to London, Oxford, Cambridge, and Bristol. To find out more, watch Prof Sparks’ 2018 talk online.