Fifty Shades of Green (2001)

A Jungle Picture for String Trio

Exotic Forest

The Agave

The Shadow and… Jaguar!

Judith Bingham, who won the BBC Young Composer Award in 1977 when she was still studying with Hans Keller, has developed a strikingly distinctive creative personality over the last thirty years or so. Her Fifty Shades of Green is a characteristically individual inspiration. “The piece is based,” she says “on Forest Landscape with Setting Sun by Henri Rousseau. In a strange jungle of flowering cacti and huge lotus flowers, a shadowy black figure is suddenly attacked by a jaguar. Rousseau took his jungle from trips to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, and it is partly the mismatching of exotic plants that gives the painting its weird, dreamlike quality. The plants seem to be leaning in and almost gleefully watching the nightmare moment at the centre of the picture.

“Although my piece falls roughly into three movements,” the composer goes on to day, “it is a more tableauesque exploration of each facet of the painting: the pizzicato opening is the exotic forest and the different sections that follow are the setting sun and strange flowers. The second movement, in simple rondo form, is the huge agave plants and massive leaves like lips on stalks. In the third movement the shadow of a man creeps along like an unsettling fear. The piece is violently terminated by the sudden appearance of the jaguar, going for the throat.”

Commissioned jointly by the Royal Philharmonic Society and the BBC as part of Radio 3’s New Generation Artists scheme, Fifty Shades of Green was first performed by the Leopold Trio at the Wigmore Hall in April 2001.