Riccardo Pes
Violoncellista e Compositore
SCOTLAND ARTISTIC RESIDENCY - ARTS COUNCIL ENGLAND
Cello between landscape, tradition and environmental research.
Music and Nature
Cello Solo Draws
Attention to Climate Change
About the project
Supported by
Music & Nature is an Arts Council England supported artistic research project developed across Scotland’s Highlands and coastal landscapes.
Inspired by the relationship between music, place and environmental awareness, the project brings together solo cello performance, composition, fieldwork and natural soundscapes. From the Sycamore Gap Tree to the North West Highlands, Riccardo Pes explores how classical music can become a way of listening to landscape, memory and the urgent fragility of the natural world.
This project was made possible thanks to the support of Arts Council England and the National Lottery.
THE ORIGIN
Lament for the Tree
In 2023, following the unlawful felling of the Sycamore Gap Tree in Northumberland, I composed Lament for the Tree as a response to a place of deep collective memory.
Suggested by my dear friend Brenda Neece, the piece draws on the Gaelic tradition of the lament — a form connected with grief, remembrance and healing. Through the cello, I wanted to give voice to the loss of a landscape that had touched people across the UK and beyond.
The response to the piece opened a wider artistic question: can music carry the memory of a place? Can sound describe a landscape almost visually? That question became the seed of Music & Nature.
Located in Northumberland, near the borderlands between England and Scotland, the Sycamore Gap Tree became for me a symbolic threshold: between memory and landscape, grief and creation, place and sound.
The Journey
Un violoncello solo per dare voce al cambiamento climatico
Il mio progetto, '𝑴𝒖𝒔𝒊𝒄 & 𝑵𝒂𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆 - Un violoncello solo per dare voce al cambiamento climatico" si svilupperà dal 28 settembre al 22 Ottobre e prevede un'esplorazione multi-discipinare su come musica, tradizione folk, ecologia e natura possano intrecciarsi. 🌍✨
Un violoncello solo per dare voce al cambiamento climatico
The north-west Highlands of Scotland have a unique scenery, an incredible UNESCO site with some of the oldest rocks in Europe. Rolling knolls of rock stand out on low-lying, boggy land, which is interspersed with isolated, forbidding mountains like Suilven, Ben Stack and Quinag. Lochans, waterfalls, tiny crofting communities and the occasional castle dot the landscape. The whole area was gouged by glaciers during the last ice age, leaving this starkly beautiful landscape behind.
Un violoncello solo per dare voce al cambiamento climatico
The north-west Highlands of Scotland have a unique scenery, an incredible UNESCO site with some of the oldest rocks in Europe. Rolling knolls of rock stand out on low-lying, boggy land, which is interspersed with isolated, forbidding mountains like Suilven, Ben Stack and Quinag. Lochans, waterfalls, tiny crofting communities and the occasional castle dot the landscape. The whole area was gouged by glaciers during the last ice age, leaving this starkly beautiful landscape behind.
Diario di Viaggio
Diario di Viaggio
Scotland
Nordic Breath: A Cello’s Ode to the Winds of Stac Pollaidh
THE WATERS OF KYLESKU at Kylesku
'Malcolm Ferguson' Atop Mountain Suilven (Scotland)
"Off I Go" (Official Music Video) | Debut Track from "Mystic Trails"
Un violoncello solo per dare voce al cambiamento climatico
Press Highlight
Riccardo Pes is bringing "Music and Nature" to Scotland tour to venues across Sutherland over the next fortnight. His project fuses classical music with environment awareness, creating powerful experiences in wild places.
NORTHERN TIMES - Caroline McMorran
Tour 2025
A journey across Scotland and the UK, bringing Music & Nature from the landscapes that inspired it to local communities, cultural venues and concert spaces.
The 2025 tour followed the thread of the residency through places connected to landscape, memory and environmental awareness — from Northumberland and Kylesku to Durness, Ullapool, the Isle of Skye and London.
