Fab night at the UK launch of new CD by Charlotte Bray at the Southbank Centre courtesy of the Richard Thomas Foundation... featuring a performance of Invisible Cities for piano and viola, originally commissioned by the Verbier Festival. The piano and the viola describe different cities, each catching glimpses of one another and absorbing elements of one another, until finally they both fade away to nothing. A fascinating and unique realisation of the Invisible Cities concept, with on the one side a barely contained boiling mass of idea and energy straining to break through to an unreachable but almost psychically sensed counterpart - and on the other a place of elusive, ethereal calm, detached but gently beckoning. The piece holds you in a tight suspense throughout, which is left - one feels - deliberately unresolved. As the two cities fade away is it because in losing their invisibility to one another their contrasting natures are reduced to a uniformity of nothingness, or is it because despite their desperate efforts to connect, they have drifted back to total invisibility from one another with nothing but the void inbetween? Perhaps you must decide. @verbierfestival @huw.watkins @southbankcentre @isangenders @barbara.buntrock #viola #piano #rtfclassical #richardthomasfoundation #italocalvino #contemporarymusic #youngcomposers #chambermusic #strings #classicalmusic (at Queen Elizabeth Hall) https://www.instagram.com/p/BpAqbxonpZO/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1p3twxsi8g0m5