Five years ago, when the composer Ian Wilson was asked to speak at his father’s funeral, like so many people he found it hard to know what to say. Now he has created a kind of wordless eulogy: Beside the Sea, which had its first UK performance at the Spitalfields music festival after several in Ireland. Fifty minutes long, it’s a solo music-theatre piece that is simultaneously a tribute to Wilson’s father’s passions, an examination of his long decline through Alzheimer’s and a wider rumination on identity and loss.
The protagonist is not a representation of Wilson or his father but a female violinist, Dušica Mladenović. Directed by Olivia Songer, she moves and plays on a small stage designed by Jack Scullion that looks like the interior of a fisher’s hut, but with a guitar, sheet music and vinyl records hanging where you would expect ropes and buckets. There is the suggestion of ageing in Mladenović’s movements, initially perky, later weary – the hint of a journey through life. She plays alongside a soundtrack made by Wilson in collaboration with Steve McCourt, built on the noises of the things Wilson’s father loved: the sea, the creak of a sailing boat, the clank of tools in a workshop, the strum of his guitar. Among these we hear recordings of the male choir he sang with for 40 years, and, most poignantly, of his wife, Wilson’s mother, a professional singer whose voice is one of the last things he recognised.
The violin acts as a kind of narrator, linking these threads together even as they become confused and fragmented. At times her line is full of restless arpeggios or spiky fragments, and when this is most at odds with the sound around her the two can feel stubbornly disconnected; at other times the violin responds to rhythms in the soundtrack, or embellishes the singing of the choir or Wilson’s mother in ways that are suddenly and startlingly moving. At such moments one almost wants the violin to break into the soundtrack; live electronic manipulation might have achieved this. But that would have made this a different work, more complex to stage, perhaps less personal. As it is, it’s portable, thoughtful and quietly, hauntingly effective.
• The Spitalfields music festival runs until 12 July.
