A private window to the soul – a sequence of desperate prayers –
a crusade from belief to doubt. Awakening Shadow channels Benjamin Britten’s crisis of faith through the singing body.
In a first Australian staging, Britten’s five Canticles are entwined with a new work by leading Australian composer Luke Styles: a
fevered photo negative.

The Canticles are a seminal portrait of Britten’s musical voice, written throughout his life for partner and muse Peter Pears. An hour-long quintet of chamber works centred on a radiant
tenor (sung here by SCO favourite Brenton Spiteri – Oscar & Lucinda, Notes from Underground), their texts draw widely on
English literature: a medieval Miracle Play, Jacobean metaphysics, poetry by T.S. Eliot & Edith Sitwell. None is specifically liturgical,
though taken as one they reveal a complex faith.

Imara Savage (La Passion de Simone, Owen Wingrave, Fly Away Peter) directs alongside Cannes award-winning filmmaker Mike Daly as part of their 2022 Creative Residency at SCO, interrogating Britten and Style’s confrontation with the eternal to forge a path through one of the 20th century’s most intense works, reinterpreted for the 21st.