Samantha Harvey's Orbital ends in a torrent of synesthetic language — not a description of music but an attempt to become it. That's a trap Nitin Sawhney walks into willingly, and for the most part his feet are sure. Commissioned by Oxford's Schwarzman Centre, Orbiting Orbital is not a soundtrack so much as a parallel artwork: six new prose pieces from Harvey, Sawhney's own compositions old and new, Antony Gormley's drawings, Mary McCartney's photographs, academic contributions from space instrumentation and ecosystem science, all staged at stadium scale with video projection, choir, and orchestra. The musical core is where Sawhney earns his commission. His classic tracks anchor the evening in the circling grooves that made his name, while the new material — the Interludes and the oratorio Drifting — finds him in more deliberately filmic territory. Hypnotic chord sequences give the London Contemporary Voices and Fantasia Orchestra (under Tom Fetherstonhaugh) space to build textural loops, their Western classical edges quietly blurred by Ashwin Srinivasan's bansuri flute and Aref Durvesh's south Asian percussion. Durvesh in particular lands with real force — his solos are ferociously articulate in a way that cuts through the ambient drift and reminds you that live bodies in a room can do things no projection can. The question the evening can't quite answer is whether Drifting — Sawhney's sounds paired with Territory Studio's new video of cloudscapes, forests, and seas — has anything genuinely new to say about the relationship between image and tone. Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass did this 50 years ago with Koyaanisqatsi, and that film had the advantage of a single sustained formal argument. Drifting is beautiful, but beautiful in a way you've seen before. The video leans on the same grammar of cosmic sublimity that fills IMAX nature documentaries; the music, lovely as it is, doesn't trouble that grammar. The non-musical elements are unevenly weighted. Gormley's drawings — humans as contested ground between light and darkness — are quietly surprising, the kind of work that holds attention without demanding it. Harvey's new vignettes and Prof Yadvinder Malhi's near-poetic ecosystem science writings are genuinely worth having. McCartney's photographs from a project offsite to Delos read more as documentation than art, and their presence in this company raises the question of whether the curatorial logic was driven by aesthetic coherence or by the gravity of famous names. The deepest problem is structural, and the reviewer names it precisely: Harvey's novel is a meditation, sustained and unbroken, and this performance keeps interrupting itself. Spoken introductions between pieces, applause breaks before and after every guest participant — the rhythm of a school concert rather than a ceremony. And there's a genuine philosophical contradiction at the heart of the evening: a live performance about the irreplaceable human fact of being embodied on Earth, mic'd and mixed so aggressively that the immediacy and friction of live sound is stripped away. You hear a simulation of music in a room rather than music in a room. For a project with this much intellectual ambition, that's a problem that deserves to be named.
