'Icarus' (Brian Greene and Philip Glass), RFH, 3 July 2010

Sipping wine on the RFH terrace afterwards with fjm and ladymoonray, we were trying to work out what to call 'Icarus':

- it wasn't a symphony as it had spoken narration and a video (very stylised and CGI'd live action.)
- it wasn't an opera or a musical as it didn't have any singing
- but it was more than a film as the musical performance, composed by Philip Glass, was too central to the event.

We settled on 'thing'.

But was it a good thing? We all loved the music and thought the visuals were well done, but the story itself - a re-imagining of the Icarus myth involving a young genius who explores a black hole - didn't quite work. It required us to believe that this Icarus was incredibly brilliant whilst forgetting a fundamental aspect of relativistic physics, and purported to feature science but never tried to explain it. Worst of all the author of the YA SF book it was based on, Dr Brian Greene, introduced it by saying "This is not science fiction, it is fiction with science!" I winced and could almost hear fjm doing likewise. Don't apologise for writing SF, and then in particular don't go on to say you are putting science in your work when you treat it like magic.

There was also a short symphony, 'Doctor Atomic', about Oppenheimer. Consensus was that it didn't work.

But it was overall fun and before the performance we were treated to a remote-control mini-airhip Penguin and Jellyfish:

(alt http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNdxaYFFiHg)