The Laurence Crane Festival comes to an end.

London’s festival Music We’d Like to Hear concludes its 2021 programme on Friday with a concert featuring two world premieres of works that pay tribute to the American marine biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson (1907-1964). The pieces were commissioned by soprano Juliet Fraser and pianist Mark Knoop, who will perform them live. This Unquiet Autumn by English composer Lara Agar uses texts written and spoken by Carson that warn of the communication gap between the scientific community and the general public.

Laurence Crane‘s Natural World explores the poetic nature of words drawn from catalogues of birds and marine life, as well as a response to Carson’s three books known as his Sea Trilogy. This concert is also the last of this year’s Laurence Crane Festival, which commemorated the 60th birthday of the English composer, born in Oxford in 1961, one of the most amusing and iconoclastic musicians born in the second half of the 20th century (and author of the last musical work composed in that century: 20th Century Music, composed on 31 December 1999.