I Send You This Cadmium Red

This highly original album of music by Gavin Bryars brings together two works with their roots in the visual arts, "I Send You This Cadmium Red" and "The Island Chapel". The former is a collaboration with artist John Christie and writer John Berger, originally made as a radio programme, while the latter was written for the Tate Gallery, St Ives. When the artist John Christie and Booker award-winning writer John Berger ('Ways of Seeing') decided to collaborate on a project, they didn't know what it might be. From urban London, Christie sent Berger, in southern France, a square of colour, with a letter that ended with the sentence "I send you this cadmium red.." Berger replied, musing on this and other colours, thereby setting in motion an extensive correspondence that moved into meditations on the essence of individual colours, but ranging widely through poetry, art history, memory. This correspondence was eventually published as an elegant book and the CD retains the book's episodic and varied non-narrative approach. In this recording, originally made as a radio broadcast by Sony Award winning producer Paul Bennun, a selection of these letters is read by their authors, accompanied by original music by Gavin Bryars, who began to work with John Berger through their mutual friendship with the late Juan Muoz. Performed by members of the Gavin Bryars Ensemble, the richly dark-toned music is designed to underline the colour themes in the texts - their texture, their atmosphere and their resonance. In addition to the radiophonic work, there is "The Island Chapel", written for a project with the Tate Gallery St Ives, and which is alluded to in the Christie/ Berger exchanges.