Contemporary Lunchtime Concert Smith Quartet Saturday 22 October - 1pm

Transcription

1 Contemporary Lunchtime Concert Smith Quartet Saturday 22 October - 1pm

2 Programme Arvo Pärt Summa Philip Glass String Quartet No 2 Company Kevin Volans String Quartet No 2 Hunting: Gathering Michael Nyman String Quartet No 5 Ian Humphries, Violin Rick Koster, Violin Nick Pendlebury, Viola Deidre Cooper, Cello

3 SMITH QUARTET Now into its third decade the Smith Quartet remains at the leading edge of the new music world. It has championed the works of the world s most celebrated composers, commissioning over 200 new pieces with recent works from Michael Nyman, Kevin Volans, Donnacha Dennehy, Joe Cutler, Tunde Jegede, Gabriel Prokofiev and the late Jon Lord. In 2015 the quartet gave the world première of Graham Fitkin s new work Distil at the Cheltenham Festival as part of a collaborative project with percussionist Joby Burgess. The work went on to receive the RPS chamber music prize for best chamber composition. The group has not only collaborated with eminent classical musicians such as Burgess, pianist John Tilbury and guitarist David Tanenbaum but also with a diverse array of artists from other disciplines including rock group Pulp, Malian singer Rokia Traoré, jazz musicians John Taylor and Django Bates and dance companies Shobana Jeyasingh, Siobhan Davies and Ultima Vez. In 2005 they were featured in the BBC s The Culture Show in discussion with Steve Reich and in the BAFTA and Emmy award-winning BBC documentary film Holocaust A Music Memorial Concert from Auschwitz performing Reich s Different Trains. Filmed on location, the film marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The quartet s touring schedule has taken them around the world appearing in many prestigious festivals including: Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Vancouver Festival, Düsseldorf Festival, Cheltenham and Edinburgh Festivals, La Biennale di Venezia, Jauna Muzika Vilnius, Vale of Glamorgan, the Flanders Festival Brussels and New York s Bang on a Can Festival. They are also Associate Artists at St John s Smith Square London. The quartet regularly records for the BBC and enjoy an ongoing relationship with Signum Classics. Their fourth album for the label, Dance, is a collection of newly commissioned dances by composers from the world of classical, jazz, rock and world music; the album received accolades in both the national and international press.

4 Previous albums on the Signum label include Steve Reich s Different Trains and the complete Philip Glass quartets which led Classic FM magazine to ask How long before the Kronos is labelled the American Smith Quartet? they are ahead of the curve at generating new repertoire and taking the experimental back catalogue seriously. Other albums of note include Django Bates You live and learn Apparently and the hugely popular Diamond Music by Karl Jenkins on Sony will see the release of Michael Nyman s quartets numbers 4 and 5 on MN records and the final disc with acclaimed pianist John Tilbury of all the Morton Feldman works for piano and strings, performed and recorded live at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. In 2015 the quartet, as part of the Kings Place minimalism unwrapped series, gave the world premiere of North Shore by Wayne Siegel as part of their European Mavericks concert. They also collaborated with David Lang (Bang on a Can, New York) in a concert of American minimalist music featuring Arke Luggage, written by Lang for the quartet and soprano Else Torpe. In the Autumn they concluded their Kings Place cycle with a performance of Michael Nyman s complete quartets and premièred Material Men, a new dance work by Shobona Jeyasingh wih music by Elena Katz- Chernin, at the QEH, receiving rave reviews. This summer the quartets together with acclaimed pianist John Tilbury released their 3rd and final disc of all of Morton Feldman's works for piano and strings performed live at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Their most recent performance of Feldman's piano and String Quartet received at St John Smith s Square received rave reviews including four and five star reviews from the Times and the Telegragh.

5 Programme Notes Arvo Pärt Summa Originally a work for voices and instruments written in 1978, the new version Summa of 1983 is described by the composer: I wanted to write a work on the text of the credo, but due to censorship the work could not bear this title. Therefore Summa is a coded title for the Credo. Philip Glass String Quartet No 2 Company Company is the name of a short novel by Samuel Beckett which was adapted for the stage and performed as a monologue by Frederick Neuman. Mr Neuman had asked and received Beckett s permission to use an original musical score which I was commissioned to compose. I liked the idea of using the medium of the String Quartet that would allow for both an introspective and passionate quality well suited to the text. Beckett picked four places in the work which he referred to as the intercices as it were. Not surprisingly these four short movements have turned out to be a thematically cohesive work which now, as my String Quartet No 2, has taken on a life of its own. Kevin Volans String Quartet No 2 Hunting: Gathering When I wrote Hunting: Gathering in 1987 I had grown tired of the composition etude the one-idea piece. I decided to try and write a piece which included as many different musical fragments as possible, strung together in a pseudo-narrative. To keep the fragments separate, each is written in a different key. As I wanted the different pieces to come and go in a random fashion like images or events on an unplanned journey, my principal problem was how to move from one key to another without any sense of development (i.e. without modulating). I was also consciously trying to keep the overall scale of events constant, not allowing one piece to dominate others unduly rather like viewing everything against a fixed horizon. Although the piece is in three sections it is conceived as one movement or, more precisely, one journey. The piece was commissioned by Doris and Myron Beigler and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts for the Kronos Quartet and first performed by them in December 1987 in San Francisco.

6 Sources: In Hunting: Gathering I made reference to many different pieces of music, ranging from rough approximations of style to more or less precise transcription. The principal ones are: part of the opening melody is derived from maz sa goala (the lyre of the initiates), a piece of music of the Hamar of South Ethiopia; a remembered tune sung by two Xhosa (I think) girls (I d lost the source material when I wrote the piece); the style of the lesiba music from Lesotho, Malienne kora music, and a small set of variations on an mbira piece Muthambe, which was played by a famous 19 th century player and medium Pasipamire, of the Shona people of Zimbabwe. There are also several private references to Scarlatti, Handel, Stravinsky and my own earlier work. Michael Nyman String Quartet No 5 ( Let s not make a song and dance about it ) The Fifth Quartet is the only one to have a programmatic subtitle and to be based solely on original material. According to the composer, it begins gently with a dance; the second and third movements are songs, the fourth is a tango; the fifth (with its moto perpetuo section) is a dance that would be dangerous to dance to, while the sixth reverts to the second and first movements. Written for and recorded by the Smith Quartet, this piece, believes its first violinist, Ian Humphries, is a deeply personal one for Nyman. You don t want to read too much autobiography into composer s works, he says, but the Fifth is definitely a departure and it was written at the time that Michael was leaving the UK to go to Mexico (where he now lives). So there is a very strong sense of leaving something and regret, but, on the other hand, a very strong sense of moving forward to something else There are links between all of the quartets and there are little motifs that he uses that always come back; when we play No 5, I can hear echoes of the Second Quartet. (Nyman Qt 5 programme notes by Jonathan Lennie)