Projects / Performance / Blue Letters from Tanganyika
Blue Letters from Tanganyika is a concert work for orchestra commissioned by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and performed many times after success in an audience vote. Broadcast repeatedly by BBC Radio 3, the music has been released on CD and MP3 download by Ffin Records.
Over nearly two years in the 1950s, a young English woman wrote over 70 letters home describing her adventures in a huge area of East Africa. That woman was John's mother, and forty years after her return, her letters inspired John Hardy to write this piece. The letters tell stories of walking through lion country, travelling by foot across wild safari, escaping a storm on the lake in log canoes and the calm of a starlit night.
The eighteen minute piece is full of exuberant African colours and textures, rich with imagery and imagination.
Listen to samples:
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The music is available to hear and buy on CD or MP3 download in our shop, or at Amazon.co.uk, Last.fm, Spotify and iTunes
"The rhythmically charged, open and immediately engaging music is bright and colourful while still managing to evoke the African landscape"
Pwyll ap Siôn, Gramophone Magazine
4 stars **** "Four colourful, finely crafted movements"
Phil Sommerich, Classical Music Magazine
'masterpiece of creation... an extraordinary piece of history'
Roy Noble, BBC Radio Wales
"Colourful, filmic, and open to pleasurable listening at a single sitting"
Howard Smith, Music & Vision
"Powerfully cinematic"
Gavin Allen, South Wales Echo