Robert Macfarlane on Orford Ness in Suffolk Credit: Rosamund Macfarlane
When Cambridge academic and writer Robert Macfarlane was asked to write a libretto for a performance celebrating the extraordinary landscape of Orford Ness, he turned his back on the world and let the voices of the landscape speak for themselves. We drank hot wine from Thermoses and cooked up a hung-over breakfast of whiting in one of the abandoned buildings." - —Dr Robert Macfarlane Orford Ness is a 12-mile shingle spit, formed by time and tide, that lies like a tapering tail of pebbles against the soft shoreline of Suffolk. Separated from the fields and farms of the mainland by the fast-flowing water of the River Ore, it is home to wild flowers and sea birds, a scattering of sheds and a red-and-white lighthouse. It is most remarkable for the sinister-looking skeletons of buildings where, in the 1950s and 196Os, teams of scientists from the Ministry of Defence developed and tested a new generation of lethal weapons and eavesdropped on the crackling and trembling of enemy airwaves as the Cold War escalated. This landscape, with its bleak beauty, wide skies and squat buildings, is the setting for Untrue Island , an experimental performance of words and music commissioned by Commissions East and the National Trust (which now owns the Ness). Performed for the first time last weekend and due to be performed again this weekend for local residents, Untrue Island weaves together a libretto by Cambridge academic and author Robert Macfarlane and a score - part-improvised, part pre-composed - by jazz musician Arnie Somogyi, all played out against a recorded backdrop of live sounds from the Ness, the swishing rhythm of sea breaking on shore, the calls of herring gulls.
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