Orbiting Orbital review – Nitin Sawhney casts a spell inspired by Samantha Harvey’s Booker winner

Schwarzman Centre, OxfordNitin Sawhney’s eclectic global fusion brings in new writings from Harvey, drawings by Antony Gormley and collaborations from academics in space and ecosystems

Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning novel Orbital ends in music – an ecstatic word-orchestra of sound summoning not the music of the spheres, but Earth itself: “the rin-tin-tin and jumbled tumbling of static galactic woodwind rainforest trance of a wild and lilting world”. It’s a brave person who’d try to turn those imagined sounds into soundtrack; enter Nitin Sawhney – multi-award-winning musician, composer and producer – and a team of seriously starry friends.

Commissioned by Oxford University’s Schwarzman Centre, Orbiting Orbital is a bewilderingly broad project that brings together six new pieces of writing by Harvey, music (old and newly composed) by Sawhney, drawings by Antony Gormley, photographs by Mary McCartney, as well as collaborations with academic in fields as disparate as space instrumentation and ecosystem science. All these elements are combined in a live event that’s part-concert, part-symposium, part show-and-tell, scaled up to stadium scope with video projections, band, choir and orchestra.

Sawhney’s eclectic global fusion cast its spell in circling grooves of classic tracks, while new Interludes and “oratorio” Drifting found him in more filmic mode, hypnotic chord-sequences setting up loops of textural variation from London Contemporary Voices and Fantasia Orchestra under conductor Tom Fetherstonhaugh, their western classical edges delicately smudged by Ashwin Srinivasan’s coaxing bansuri flute and Aref Durvesh’s south Asian percussion – the latter’s ferociously virtuosic, articulate solos a knockout.

Nearly 50 years on from Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass’s Koyaanisqatsi, does Drifting – pairing Sawhney’s sounds with new video (cloudscapes, forests, seas) from Territory Studio have anything new to say? And what are we to make of McCartney’s holiday snaps from a project offsite to Delos? Gormley’s drawings – a negotiation between light and darkness, humans the contested ground at the centre – are a treat though, as are Harvey’s minutely observed vignettes and the near-poetry of Prof Yadvinder Malhi’s writings.

Harvey’s Orbital is, above all, a meditation – something this performance currently isn’t. Spoken intros between pieces and applause-breaks before and after every guest participant give school concert instead of a seamless sequence of shifting perspectives. And, while we’re contemplating what it is to be of and from Earth, there’s something wilful about playing live music in an intimate venue while mic’ing and mixing those sounds so aggressively that they’re stripped of precisely that immediacy and friction that makes them human.