Eve was commissioned by the Ossian Ensemble for the Sounds New Festival and was premiered in Canterbury on 15 May 2010. It takes as its setting, Eve in the Garden of Eden at the moment she is approached and subsequently seduced by the Serpent into eating the forbidden fruit. The text, by the writer and pianist Neil Georgeson, is a creative transcription of this intensely dramatic moment from Book IX of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In composing this work I sought to express the violence of Eve’s conflicting emotions surrounding her decision as well as the shocking brevity of this moment that forever altered humanity.
