Seasonal Quartet: Ali Smith and New European Ensemble review – words and music connect
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Spitalfields festival, London
New pieces written in response to the novelist’s works by Kate Moore, Alice Yeung, Seung-Won Oh and Sara Zamboni made for ravishing harmonies and interplay in an unusual concert
Why write words about music, Hans Keller once asked, when you could just write music about music instead? His mid-century essays in sound were never more than an experimental curiosity, but one that exposed the acts of translation, mediation and re-creation we undertake without thinking every time we describe our favourite symphony or explain why a song makes us cry. Reversing the process, this curious concert by the Netherlands’ New European Ensemble (which travels to the Edinburgh book festival next month) invited music about words, as four composers responded to novels by Ali Smith.
Interconnectedness – paths that intersect, patterns that repeat, stories and lives that echo – binds the four books of Smith’s Seasonal Quartet. This project spins that web still wider in new commissions from four female composers: Australia’s Kate Moore, Alice Yeung from Hong Kong, South Korean Seung-Won Oh, and Italy’s Sara Zamboni. Pieces by Peter Maxwell Davies, Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Kinan Azmeh completed the sequence of narration and performance taking audiences through a cycle from autumn to summer.
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