»The initial idea was, what if we conceptualised the piece as this huge gesamtkunstwerk that’s so massive you couldn’t ever make it, but that we pretend has been made, but we have access only to parts of it,« composer Conor McLean (b. 1996) tells me. His collaborator, the pianist Nikolaus von Bemberg (b. 1991), clarifies further in a way that temporally complicates things »we thought, what if we find a piece in the future but only parts of it because it came to us in a mysterious way. So these are its fragments.«
When they started working on the piece more than two years ago, it was the depth of the covid lockdowns that had put an end to the vast majority of live performances and also all that made them thrilling; the feeling of being there, with people, sharing something. At that moment, they wanted to project themselves into the future.