Imber: press coverage

Selection of quotes

The Daily Telegraph, 16 August 2003

The Wiltshire Times, 27 June 2003:
"Life is being breathed back into the ghost village of Imber with a three-day concert at the Church of St Giles, backed by the Wiltshire Times.

"Imber, on Salisbury plain, has been empty for more than 60 years. The 160 residents were forced to move out by the British Army in 1943 and since then the village has been used for military training manoeuvres." (Matt Wilkinson)

The Observer, 10 August 2003:
"Deep in the impact zone, on one of the 25 days a year when live firing is not scheduled, Salisbury Plain seems almost unmarked by its century of military occupation. Apart from caterpillar tracks and the occasional scuppered tank left out for target practice like an upended beetle, it's the emptiest, wildest of landscapes. No telephone wires, no livestock, no tractors, no people; just 94,000 acres of scrub and rabbit holes and trees. The abandoned village of Imber lies, like sediment, in a remote dip on the Plain. It was always isolated ('Little Imber on the downe/Seven miles from any towne'), but now the first sight of its distant church tower, through a shroud of trees, seems doubly unlikely, no matter how keenly you have been looking out for it." (Harriet Lane - read full article)

The Independent, 10 August 2003:
"If Kancheli's monumental Imber music is designed to lay the past to rest, then the 68-year old composer is uniquely placed to do so. Not because he is, like Arvo Pärt, a holy minimalist (Kancheli, who speaks through his interpreter daughter, knows enough English to roll his eyes at the description), so much as a composer interested in a kind of secular spirituality. 'There is a difference between religious and spiritual music,' he insists. 'My music is definitely not religious.'" (Louise Gray)

The Daily Telegraph, 23 August 2003:
"Alighting in Imber, you are greeted by a huge, photographic trompe-l'oeil, depicting the perfect English village Imber once was, all thatched cottages with roses climbing up the walls. But once you have walked through the optical illusion, you find yourself in a chilling hell-hole that resembles Kosovo, a ghost village in which all life seems to have been extinguished." (Charles Spencer)

The Times, 25 August 2003:
"I came away saddened but also strangely elated. Saddened because the obliteration of this one village, so powerfully evoked, suddenly seemed symbolic of the disappearance of whole swathes of rural England. But elated because there is a powerful link in the English psyche between landscape, memory, mortality and continuity. People die, but mankind trudges on, and the land sees all — a silent witness to the passions and struggles of generations. “What will survive of us is love,” Philip Larkin wrote, after noting a devoted couple depicted, hand in hand, in a marble effigy at Arundel. Few of us will end up as a marble effigy. But what draws people to places like Imber, in spite of all obstacles, is a desire to memorialise the love that once was — to ensure, in other words, that no community disappears entirely without trace or remembrance.

"Which is quite a paradox, isn’t it? The war that ended Imber’s existence was fought to protect this country from a dictator who wanted to erase not just communities but whole races without trace. So, in a sense, Imber died that England might live. Regarded like that, its fate seems not so much tragic as heroic. Even so, Imber today seems desolate, full of ghosts. I left it with a shiver. May we hope that this blighted part of Salisbury Plain will be gently prised from the Army’s grasp and restored to its lyrical rural beauty before another 60 years have passed?" (Richard Morrison - read full article)

Salisbury Journal, 28 August 2003:
"Walking around this desolate place, Artangel's creations brought the village strangely to life - the Morris Traveller cruising around the village square was reminiscent of a surreal French film.

"As light faded, strains of the haunting sounds of unaccompanied Georgian folk music could be heard and as the Rustavi Male Voice Choir came closer, everyone started to follow them candle lanterns in hands, in true Pied Piper fashion. They led the way through the village to St Giles church accompanied by the walking replica house, another strange Artangel creation. Their singing was tremendous, rousing and uplifting." (Anne Morris)

The Guardian, 28 August 2003:
"...the evening was a wonderful piece of theatre, with a whole village becoming both set and players, and we the audience transformed into temporary citizens of Imber. Not only incongruous in its form, it was deliciously incongruous in its genesis: the Church of England, Artangel and the British army are unlikely bedfellows." (Charlotte Higgins)

The Spectator, 30 August 2003:
"How many villages have we lost to the North Sea, to the Black Death, to the Industrial revolution, to the spread of cities, to the building of roads? How many lost villages are submerged in London alone?" (John Spurling)

Frieze, Issue 78, October 2003:
"The singers created a complex polyphony that seemed at once medieval and utterly modern, as if a 15th-century monastic choir had been given a brief insight into 20th-century Modernist composition. As they reached the church, the crescendo of voices fell quiet. Just as their sound had been rousing, so their silence thickened and fed the poignancy of the moment. Inside the church, Kancheli’s composition, performed by the choir along with a small chamber ensemble, seemed fundamentally driven by a dramaturgical impulse, and as it unfolded, it became increasingly apparent that any attempt to dissociate the music from the story of Imber itself would be overwhelmingly difficult. Unusual instrumental contrasts formed delicate textures, of which silence was as definite a presence as any timbre. Fragments of English pastoralism inflected the score’s Eastern European characteristics, and leavened the sombre subject matter with an optimistic humour. Kancheli’s Imber teemed with hope as much as with sadness. For the members of a small audience in a remote church far from home the event almost had the air of a requiem held by survivors of some unnamed catastrophe, attempting to reconcile an uneasy past with an uncertain future." (Dan Fox - read full article)