Wild Swans
A haunting fairytale reimagined through music, visual art and voice in Wild Swans.
Legendary broadcaster and voice of Classic FM radio John Suchet OBE lends his unmistakable warmth and authority to a new reimagining of Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairytale Wild Swans. This new breadth of work, written, arranged and illustrated by composer Steve Thompson, features music by acclaimed composer Elena Kats-Chernin and offers a genre defying piece combining literature, visual art and contemporary classical performance.
Rewritten for a modern audience and beautifully illustrated in a surreal, dreamlike style, Wild Swans gives new psychological depth to its characters - particularly the Queen, who emerges as a complex figure grappling with grief, power, and transformation. At its heart is the evocative music of Elena Kats-Chernin, original composer of Wild Swans as a ballet score, which premiered at Sydney Opera House in 2003 and presented the Eliza Aria, a piece widely recognised for its later use in Lloyds TBS’s TV advertisement. Now reimagined for trombone, performed by Thompson and piano by Sequoia Sounds (John Paul Gandy), Wild Swans provides an elegant, cinematic counterpart to Suchet’s iconic narration, who as an accomplished amateur trombonist himself, brings a deep empathy and lyricism to his performance.
In an era of background noise and bite-size media, Wild Swans invites readers and listeners to slow down and hear a story you thought you knew…but as you’ve never heard it before.
Wild Swans will be released as a hardback and deluxe hardback art book with full-colour illustrations, vinyl and CD album, and a 50-minute audiobook and eBook this autumn.