'I, Time'...by Auckland composer Richard Francis, is based on New Zealand poet Allen Curnow's Time - described as a mediation on the slippery and paradoxical concept of time. In Curnow's poem, Time is personified, somewhat like an omnipresent god. It's both abstract and the concrete physical evidence of all things that exist.
About his musical interpretation, Richard says, "This poem has inspired the form, content and rationale of the work as a whole."
'I, Time' is the second movement of Richard's 2016 work Three Movements for Orchestra. The titles of the movements are all taken from meaningful junctures in the story implied by Curnow's poem. Richard explains:
“The first movement is basically about the now, the present tense ‘I am…’; the second movement ‘I, Time’ is really about the now, the immediate; and the third movement is ‘The Beginning and the End’ which is about past and future.”
The structure, flow and language expressed in each movement are creatively represented in musical terms by pace, texture and timbre.
Fittingly, the second movement, performed here by the NZSO conducted by Hamish McKeich, "has an immediacy about the language."
I, Time was recorded by RNZ in April 2017 at Wellington's Michael Fowler Centre as part of the NZ Composer Sessions.
