I won’t pretend to know much about opera, but was hooked by the radio show , on the BBC World Service recently. It previews an as yet untitled work by Walshe (pictured above), a professor of composition at the University of Oxford. She is writing the opera with Mark O’Connell as librettist – he won the Wellcome Book Prize in 2018 for his exploration of transhumanism.
The opera is set on Mars and is about female astronauts. How might music develop in the noisy environment of a Martian base? As well as ordinary orchestration, it features industrial sounds, such as leaking helium cannisters. More will be revealed in July when the finished work, devised for the Irish National Opera, debuts in Galway, Ireland.
Mars is also a way into subjects from climate to life and non-life. Walshe’s interests are wide, as my colleague Alex Wilkins noted () after hearing a talk by her at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. Catch her on .
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