Portraits

Chloë Sommer and Ewan Bailey guide you round a sonic exhibition of portraits, where you’ll encounter Dorian Gray gazing at his own likeness and reflecting sadly that he will age, while the painting remains unchanged (spoiler alert: that’s not quite how it pans out); Amy Sackville imagines Velazquez painting his masterpiece Las Meninas and poet Robert Lowell looks at Holbein's Thomas More, whilst in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennett’s feelings about Mr Darcy undergo a transformation as she stands looking at his portrait, and poet Wendy Cope is moved to tears by a painting of a long dead couple. The music includes Margaret Bonds’ portrait in song Minstrel Man in which a Black man sings of the pain and humiliation of the role he has to play, Edward Elgar's friends, whose moods inspired his Enigma Variations, Rembrandt's The Night Watch as seen by King Crimson, there’s also The Gnome from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Joni Mitchell revealing the multiple facets of Charles Mingus’s personality, and Missy Mazzoli’s distinctive take on Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Dishevelled Hair.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Readings & *Music

*Ralph Vaughan Williams - 3 Portraits from the England of Elizabeth: No. 1, Explorer
Wendy Cope - Dutch Portraits
*Pehr Henrik Nordgren - Portraits of Country Fiddlers, Op. 26 (Arr. D. Woodruff): II. Tuumsi Tuumsikelija (The Thinker)
Robert Lowell - Sir Thomas More
*Modest Mussorgsky - Pictures at an Exhibition, Piano Concerto Version: I. Gnomus
Josephine Tey - The Daughter of Time
*Charles Mingus - Portrait
*Sam Prekop - Faces And People
Jake Morris-Campbell - Self-Portrait in Passport Photobooth
*Michael Nyman - The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: Scene 3: The Photographs: What is this?
*Kraftwerk - Spiegelsaal
Eavan Boland - The Photograph on My Father’s Desk
Edward Lear - Self-Portrait of the Laureate of Nonsense
*Gregory Porter - Mona Lisa
David Dabydeen - A Harlot’s Progress
*Margaret Bonds - 3 Dream Portraits, Minstrel Man
Amy Sackville - Painter to the King
*King Crimson - The Night Watch
Sophie Haydock - The Flames
*Ēriks Ešenvalds - In My Little Picture Frame
*Oneohtrix Point Never - Last Known Image of a Song
Dante Gabriel Rossetti - The Portrait
*Edward Elgar - Enigma Variations, Op. 36: I. C.A.E.
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
*Missy Mazzoli - Self-Portrait with Dishevelled Hair
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
*Gerard Schurmann - 6 Studies of Francis Bacon: VI. Self-Portrait
Elizabeth Jennings - Old Man
*Joni Mitchell - God Must Be a Boogie Man
Keith Douglas - Vergissmeinnicht,
*Vladimir Michailovich Jurowski - Symphonic Pictures 'Russian Painters': III. Portrait of an Unknown Woman
Henry James - The Portrait of a Lady
*Nikolai Myaskovsky - 12 Romances After Lermontov, Op. 40: No. 4, To the Portrait
Thomas Randolph - Upon his picture
*Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian - Cave Painting