Mon Seul Desir: The Lady and Unicorn Tapestries

Enjoy a deeply immersive experience with Mon Seul Desir.

Enjoy a deeply immersive experience with Mon Seul Desir, a composition scored for soprano, harp and narrator, with electronic soundtrack and video projection.

 

Mon Seul Desir, by York-based composer David Lancaster, was inspired by the Lady and Unicorn tapestries which hang in the Cluny Museum of the Middle Ages in Paris. Each tapestry includes a finely dressed lady with lion and unicorn, and sometimes a second woman, surrounded by flowers, animals, birds and heraldic regalia. The only text on the tapestries appears on the sixth: ‘Mon Seul Desir’ (possibly intimating that courtly love is a ‘sixth sense’) and this provides the title of the new work.

Mon Seul Desir is a deeply immersive experience in performance. Scored for soprano (Sarah-Jane Gibson), harp (Rachel Davies) and narrator (Emily Rowan), it includes interludes of recorded sounds, and video projection of the tapestries.

The soprano’s songs are based on words from the medieval French poem ‘La Capture de la Licorne’ by Thibault IV of Champagne (1201-53) sung in a modern adaptation. The same words are heard in their original form on the recorded tracks. The narrator provides an introduction to the tapestries written by Rainer Maria Rilke, from his work The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910).

Come along and enjoy an incredible multi-media performance.

 

About the composer

David Lancaster is Associate Professor of Composition at York St John University; his music has been performed, broadcast and recorded internationally. Most recently his ‘Canzone Sospesa’ received a first performance in Milan, and ‘Hop Skip Jump’ was performed by York Youth Orchestra and performers from York Dance Space.