Neck of the Woods, for Turner-prizewinning artist Douglas Gordon is a retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood story.  It brings together an impressive group of talents: Gordon, the pianist Hélène Grimaud, actor Charlotte Rampling and the Mexican-born writer and film-maker Veronica Gonzalez Peña.

Gordon has worked with the piano before:  in The End of Civilisation, he set a piano on fire in the Cumbrian hills and filmed it burning.  Grimaud is a world-renowned pianist and only slightly less well-known as a wolf conservationist, having established a wolf conservation centre in New York State.   And Gordon is also fascinated by wolves, hence this Manchester International Festival commission.    

Gonzalez Peña’s script is, ostensibly, a version of the Red Riding Hood story: playing to a cultural fear of wolves and of evil -  not the depiction Grimaud would champion in her other life.  For many cultures the wolf is a positive, even heroic figure: contrast the reverence given by the American Indians with the loathing and fear imported from Europe by later Americans.  

Neck of the Woods, which opened last night at HOME in Manchester, is at one level a struggle between artistic licence and Grimaud’s conservation agenda:  how to make a balanced portrayal of a species in trouble when so much great art has been built around wolf myth and metaphor?

Hélène Grimaud personifies that struggle, while the other artists had no such dilemma.  A piece about the ecology of a keystone species that evokes powerful and contradictory feelings would be a tremendous creative challenge for someone, but Neck of the Woods turns out not to be that piece.

For Gordon and González Peña, it is firmly rooted in the tradition of myth-making, which, on balance, has not served the wolf well.   Rather than use art to illuminate and challenge perceptions, it seemed to me to take the easier route – to build on what centuries of ignorance have offered us many times before.  There is an ulterior agenda, for sure.  Gordon has stated that he wanted to show that “men are worse than wolves” thereby once again using wolves to set a benchmark for measuring others’ badness.

So Hélène Grimaud’s personal mission to right all the misperceptions about wolves, and their consequences for the species, has had to take second place. 

The best bit is at the very beginning.  Starting in complete darkness, we hear a recording of a man chopping down a tree.  The darkness forces us to listen intently to the man’s breathing and the cut of his axe.  Over what seemed like several minutes, his efforts grow more desperate, his chopping more irregular, and he seems on the point of giving up when the trunk starts to splinter, and it falls, leaves and branches creating a crashing crescendo, to finish with a subsonic thud that I felt in my chest.  Ninety minutes later this was how the piece ended, also in darkness.

In between, Rampling tells her story, blended with that of Little Red Riding Hood.  Waking from a nightmare about wolves, she takes us through the narrative a few sentences at a time.  She and Grimaud alternate a dozen or more times.  This is two one-woman shows, chopped up and performed in turn.  We hear Rachmaninov and some dark minor-key chords.  A few more lines of narrative and then, as interludes between fragments of text, mini-medleys of Bach-with-Schumann, Rachmaninov-with-Beethoven, Ravel, Chopin. 

Now and again the disembodied and chilling voice of Gordon hints at the real story.  Rampling has complete command of the pace of the narrative, and of her coldly traumatised persona.  Grimaud is, as always, in command of her material, and occasionally dazzles.  The Sacred Sounds Women’s Choir is effective in the dark, behind a black gauze curtain, with wordless vocalisations, and dimly-lit hand gestures in imitation of the wind-blown trees that haunt Rampling’s nightmares (and in which live wolves).

It is, in the end, a story about men (one man) and an evil worse than any wolf.  This is signalled often and early enough for there to be no shocking reveal.  The music is there to pace the narrative, to slow down what is always going to come.  The lighting and the occasional snow, and odd bits of ambient sound from Eno add a bit, but not much, to what is basically a showcase for two talented women and a story; just about the sum of its parts.

Neck of the Woods runs at HOME, 2 Tony Wilson Place, First Street, Manchester, as part of the Manchester international festival, until18 July.

Over the last year NATURAL LIGHT has featured Australian birds and the music they have inspired several times.  Glorious birdsong, the threat that it faces, the loss, “and the soulless noise that we’re left with when they’re all gone” are the inspiration for Australian composer Brett Dean’s Pastoral Symphony, which will be paired with Beethoven’s own homage to the countryside at the BBC Proms on 2 August.  

Dean is following in the footsteps of Tate and Sculthorpe, as well as living composers such as John Rodgers and David Lumsdaine, who are among several Australians who appear to have created a modern tradition of celebrating birdsong in their works.  With the dynamic young Aurora Orchestra, who specialise in playing from memory, expect a powerful sense of direct communication with the audience.  

A few days later it is the turn of the best-known musico-ornithologists, Olivier Messiaen.  Little over a year after Peter Hill premiered a newly discovered Messiaen bird-piece, La Fauvette Passerinette, Chris Dingle, Professor at Birmingham Conservatoire, repeats the feat with a new piece for orchestra.   Messiaen’s Un oiseau des arbres de Vie (oiseau Tui) - A bird from the tree of Life (Tui bird) - will receive its world premiere on 7 August.  It is an orchestral tour de force featuring a single species, the Tui of New Zealand.  Tui are known for their noisy, unusual call, that varies for each individual, combining bell-like notes with clicks, cackles, creaks and groans. Ravel’s Oiseaux Tristes – Sad Birds – is also on the programme.  Ravel is said to have been inspired by the “elegant melancholy Arabesque” of a blackbird singing in Fontainebleau forest.

Later this month Chris Dingle will describe how he brought the piece to life in a guest blog for NATURAL LIGHT.  He will also be speaking at a pre-concert event at the Royal College of Music, which will be broadcast on Radio 3 during the interval.  

The following evening two works remind us of spring.  Mahler’s bitterly beautiful Ninth Symphony is also full of birdsong and, in Alban Berg’s view, “expresses an extraordinary love of the earth, for Nature”. The National Youth Orchestra’s annual concert opens with the world premiere of Tansy Davies’s Re-greening, a celebration of spring written specially as a complement to Mahler’s Symphony.

Music and great nature broadcasting are two of the BBC’s biggest reasons to exist, and the Proms is the natural place to bring the two together, in a concert of music from the series Life Story, composed by Murray Gold.  Sir David Attenborough and members of the production team present footage from the series in a Sunday afternoon family concert on 30 August.

And finally, a late night Prom on 10 September is in collaboration with six of the BBC national radio stations and BBC Music.  The Radio 4 show Wireless Nights is brought to the concert hall, pairing music and spoken word inspired by the night. Jarvis Cocker presents an evening he describes as ‘a nocturnal investigation of the human condition’, with Maxime Tortelier conducting the BBC Philharmonic. The blurb says that badgers, stars, elves and lambs may or may not be involved.

You can read NATURAL LIGHT's feature series on the 2014 Proms here, and keep up with the nature featured in this year's festival in a forthcoming series of articles and reviews.

In what may seem like the final leg of a journey towards respectability, street artist Matt Sewell has put the finishing touches to his latest commission:  promotional material for the National Trust’s Sounds of Our Shores project. 

The three month project, launched today, is set to create the first ever UK coastal sound map, using sounds recorded by the public.  A collaboration between the National Trust, the British Library and the National Trust for Scotland, the project will run throughout the summer of 2015, closing on the 21 September.

It seems a far cry from the Old Moor underpass, where I first came across Matt’s work.  Old Moor is an RSPB reserve among the former coal mining villages of Barnsley.  In 2010 the RSPB brought Matt in to work with art students from local schools and colleges to brighten up a concrete underpass that was part of the nearby TransPennine Trail.  The project was so successful that two more graffiti art projects were commissioned along the trail.

Since then, Matt has gone on to author several bird books in which his unique visual take is matched by succinct descriptions that capture a deep, if offbeat, relationship between artist and subject.

Earlier this year Matt added his voice to the chorus of protest that greeted the deletion of over fifty nature words from the Oxford Junior Dictionary, covered on several occasions by NATURAL LIGHT.  It was then that I called him to try to understand what makes him tick.

“I’d been a street artist since the late 1990s” he explained, “and started working for fashion mags and the like but by 2007 I’d just had enough.  My wife and I were living in Brighton and one day we just left and went to Australia, just travelling around a lot.”

While in Australia he carried on with street art, “some official, some unofficial” but realised that all he really wanted to do was watch birds.  I asked if he had been a birdwatcher up to that point.  “I think it was when I was watching a splendid fairy wren in Australia, a wonderful blue thing, that I had a flash of realisation how much I loved birds.”  He realised he had been passionate about them since growing up alongside his family’s smallholding in Willington, County Durham.

“We came back to the UK and I decided to devote most of my work to birds” he says, “but found we were in the middle of the credit crunch and all my old contacts had moved on.”  His Australian adventures made him look afresh at everyday British birds.  “I saw how blue a blue tit is and thought, wow! it’s a British bird.”  

Matt’s work caught the eye of Jeff Barrett, founder of the website Caught by the River, who asked him to design a logo.  That led to a regular contribution, Matt Sewell’s Bird of the Week.  “I had to start the series with the blue tit, as it has become my favourite bird” he says.  "I painted the bird and added a couple of sentences, it was the first thing I ever wrote."

His commentary on the house sparrow, an early subject of the series, is typical:  As British as chip butties and bramble picking, they even look like they’re wearing a flat cap for Christ’s sake. When you see them abroad they don’t look right, like they shouldn’t be there. Faded, out of place and a bit sad. Like some leathery Brit that’s been in Ibiza/Thailand/Goa for far, far too long and lost their way. Come home!

A book of such gems was inevitable, and Ebury Press published Our Garden Birds in 2012.  “It’s just a collection of musings and memories of encounters I have had with these birds,” he explains, “but at the same time I’m trying to give people a different understanding of the countryside and wildlife.  Trying to open people’s eyes.” 

The National Trust’s Sounds of Our Shores project, for which Matt has contributed the artwork, including the logo at the top of this blog, now hopes to open people’s ears, too.

The three participants were united by their anger.  Jeremy Deller is the artist whose six-room exhibition English Magic at the 2013 Venice Biennale included a painting of a giant hen harrier clutching a Range Rover.  As symbols of the unequal struggle between oppressor and oppressed, they were well chosen, not least because the painting was a direct response to Deller's anger at the news of the shooting of two hen harriers at the royal estate in Sandringham.

Presenter Chris Packham is well known for stepping into the firing line over illegal bird killing, on behalf of both hen harriers and migrant birds in Malta.  George Monbiot's assessment chimed with Deller's skillfully-wrought artistic response:  the only people who want hen harriers to go extinct are the landowners who have the means to make it happen, but no popular support.  The ones with all the popular support have no power to stop them.

The trio went on to critique Packham's own artistic efforts - good third year stuff according to Deller - and the role of the BBC and Sir David Attenborough in projecting the reality - or otherwise - of the threats facing the planet.  The programme is available on the BBC iPlayer, and well worth an hour of anyone's time.

The East Neuk Festival (27 June – 5 July) has been going since 2004 and has always revelled in its location:  the beautiful Fife coast and its many harbour villages. Its weekend festival-within-a-festival Littoral is a celebration of our profound connections with nature, landscape and seascape. 

Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain has become a beacon of place-writing for two generations of writers.  On 27 June Poet Tom Pow leads a discussion on this extraordinary work.  Later in the day Pow returns for a conversation with Helen Macdonald, winner of this year’s prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize, who will discuss her book H is for Hawk.


After talks from wildlife photographer Laurie Campbell and conservationist Sir John Lister Kaye a closing panel discussion led by writer James Robertson will ask: what is the relationship between a place and its observer?

The following day Lister-Kaye and writer Mark Cocker explore Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water and its impact on nature writers more than half a century after it was first published.  

Neck of the Woods is written by New York-based novelist and playwright Veronica Gonzalez Peña.  NATURAL LIGHT will review the opening night, July 10 and Neck of the Woods is on seven dates until 18 July.


For ticket details of all events click on the festival links or visit our What’s On page.

Coming up this month:  poet James Giddings leads a fun exploration of poetry and birds in this family friendly drop-in workshop. James will be inspiring visitors to the RSPB Bempton Cliffs reserve to re-create the sounds of Bempton. Part of the Bridlington Poetry Festival 12-21 June.

13 June 11am-3pm, RSPB Bempton Cliffs.  Free (entry charge to reserve for non-members).

Bempton Cliffs is the best place in England to see, hear and smell seabirds!  Each year, 250,000 of them flock to the cliffs between Bempton and Flamborough in East Yorkshire to find a mate and raise their young.

From April to August, the cliffs are alive with nest-building adults or young chicks taking their first faltering steps. With huge numbers to watch, beginners can easily learn the difference between gannets, guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes and fulmars.

See our What's On page for more nature-inspired events around the UK.

Hormone-disrupting pollutants in the urban rivers of South Wales may seem like a strange inspiration for an artwork.  But a Pontypridd artist has chosen to interpret the story of the dipper, and research by one of the UK’s leading pollution scientists, in a new and very personal work. 

River Canary is Tara Okon’s response to the discovery that decades after we thought Wales’s rivers had been cleaned up industry’s legacy is having adverse effects on the health and development of wild birds.

Tara, whose ink drawings have a geometric complexity reminiscent of her artistic hero M.C. Escher, uses a similar tessellation style to tell contemporary stories.  “I read about the impact of pollution on the dipper in an article by Professor Steve Ormerod, and something clicked.” 

Ormerod’s 35-year study of dippers showed that decades after the worst industrial and mining effluents had been cleaned from rivers like Tara’s local Taff, there is a lingering legacy.  The addition of newer chemicals creates a cocktail with surprising results.  Tara has noticed there are now more dippers on the Taff compared with years ago.  But Steve and his team at Cardiff University have found that urban dippers hatch fewer female chicks than those nesting in rural rivers nearby, while urban chicks are underweight compared with their rural counterparts.

Described as possessing a “naturalness and a philosophical bent at the same time,” Seattle folk-artist Wren’s haunting melodies evoke the lands and waters of her native Pacific Northwest, as well as Galicia, Spain, where she learned the traditional Celtic-influenced coastal music.

On May 19th, Wren will issue her first release in three years, the ‘name-your-price’ single The Road You Thought You Knew, with a new album of original songs about transformation, love, and the soul of wild lands due out later this year. A Kickstarter for the Galicia-themed album runs until May 27.

Wren, a.k.a. Laura Brady writes exclusively for NATURAL LIGHT, expanding on that deep connection with nature.

Growing up, my entire scope of reference was my backyard, its sunny, grassy center with currants and other fruits for the taking, and the dark, damp corners where earthworms emerged from the moist soil and snails left shiny trails. I delighted in capturing bugs, and stashed a collection of jars on the side-yard in which various gladiator battles took place between confused insects until I remembered, or forgot, to release them.

School simultaneously broadened me; stretching my thinking skills and teaching me about the world, but narrowed my greater awareness. It took me indoors, to factual books and computers and concrete reasoning. I forgot how to play make believe, and hunt for ants, and watch the green, hard ball of a currant slowly catch fire.

The years passed, and as my academic success grew, my talents receiving more and more recognition, my happiness and vitality plummeted. Something was missing. My health was a shambles (having been diagnosed with an auto-immune disorder), and my mental health was suffering. I felt stuck in the same thought processes – an egocentric framework – that I could not escape.

Then, at age nineteen, I went to Quebec for the summer to learn French and work on organic farms and fell in love with the land. It was a euphoric, breath-taking experience of discovering something bigger than myself, something more. I would rush through my farm chores every day, then run out to the wild fields and woods to prance, leap, and collapse in ecstatic bliss, to watch the sky and breathe the sweet, fresh air. 

I road-tripped to Colorado to study primitive skills, and found the name Wren, which would become my stage name. I began to study permaculture, a holistic way of living on the earth. I moved to Galicia, Spain, a place where many of the old ways and traditions of living on the earth are still preserved, though in hiding. And there, on a tract of land with over a thousand years of history, I truly came home to the earth, finding a place that spoke to me deeply.

When I rediscovered nature, I also rediscovered music.  And as I have deepened my songwriting, I see more and more that each song is drawn out of the deep well that is the natural world. Making music is how I tap into the greater system, the web of symbol and form that is the wilderness around us. My singing is how I translate this process and bring it out into the world to share with others. I sing, and dream, that as a people we can ‘stitch an ocean,’ a new vision for our lives in which we are no longer separate from the earth, but instead a beneficial part. 

For 27 years Hay Festival has brought together writers from around the world to debate and share stories in the staggering beauty of the English and Welsh Borders. Hay celebrates great writing from poets and scientists, lyricists and comedians, novelists and environmentalists.  As usual, wildlife and environmental groups are closely associated this year.

Hay Fever is the young people’s festival within a festival, and welcomes nature enthusiasts Nicola Davies from the Really Wild Show, Piers Torday, Tom Moorhouse, Katie Scott and Virginia McKenna.  RSPB garden safaris and workshops are on every day, although many have sold out. Click the link for the full programme.

Hay on Earth is a programme for sustainability, and includes a day-long forum on Thursday 21 May exploring global sustainability issues.

Several other literary stars who have supported the campaign are taking part in the Hay programme including Nicola Davies, Melissa Harrison (At Hawthorn Time, 25 May), Tony Juniper, Helen MacDonald, Michael Morpurgo and children’s illustrator Jackie Morris.  Jackie’s beautiful book Queen of the Sky, about a peregrine and a girl who live on the west Wales coast, is featured on 31st.

On 24 May Canadian explorer John Hemming celebrates the Amazonian feats of three famous naturalist-explorers of 150 years ago:  Alfred Russel Wallace, Henry Walter Bates and Richard Spruce.  Closer to home, Britain’s shoreline is explored by Patrick Barkham (Coastlines, 28 May) in association with National Trust Wales.

Tough issues are tackled over two days on 28 and 29 May.  On the Thursday the Chief Veterinary Officer for Wales, Christianne Glossop, debates one of the most contentious issues in the countryside today:  badgers and bovine TB.  Later that day Bill Oddie will hopefully lighten the mood, although Bill is himself an outspoken champion of the badger’s cause, so who knows? The following day, economist Dieter Helm will argue that the environment is an economic asset and should be treated as such, and Tony Juniper (What Nature Does for Britain) will develop the idea of “natural capital.”  Prepare for some serious humour when Marcus Brigstocke tackles climate change later on 29th, before Jules Pretty addresses extinctions – in nature, and among human traditions and languages.

Click here for the full Hay programme, or visit our What’s On page for just the green bits.

Reveil starts in Rotherhithe near the Greenwich Meridian and travels west from one open microphone to the next, following the wave of sound that loops the earth with the rising sun, picking up audio feeds from forest cams, very low frequency receivers, deep ocean hydrophones, space radio stations, and a network of soundcamps and streamers, in a sequence lasting one earth day.

Tony, who works for the RSPB's South West England team, is especially hoping to capture the dawn song of Dartington's robins.  "Back in the 1930s, Dartington was where the pioneering ornithologist David Lack studied robin behaviour," he said, "his work became one of the first species monographs and I love the idea that I'll be recording birds who may well be descended from the ones he studied."

The Dartington broadcast will be part of a listening event called a SoundCamp - one of several being held around the world to mark International Dawn Chorus Day.  SoundCamps in the UK will be at Stave Hill Ecological Park, London; Piel View House, Furness Peninsula, Cumbria; Dartington Hall, Totnes, Devon and the Ulster Museum, Belfast.  There will be others in New York, Chicago, Toronto, Italy, Slovenia, Estonia and Greece.  Tony will also be leading listening walks, continuing a long Dartington tradition of outdoor listening, recording and sonic art.