The New European Ensemble performed a concert inspired by Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet at the Spitalfields festival, held at the Dutch Church in London. The ensemble, which will also perform at the Edinburgh book festival in August, commissioned new pieces from four female composers: Kate Moore from Australia, Alice Yeung from Hong Kong, Seung-Won Oh from South Korea, and Sara Zamboni from Italy. Each composer responded to one of Smith's novels from the quartet, creating a web of interconnectedness that mirrors the themes of the books.
Composers and their works
The concert featured pieces by Kate Moore, Alice Yeung, Seung-Won Oh, and Sara Zamboni, alongside works by Peter Maxwell Davies, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, and Kinan Azmeh. The sequence of narration and performance took audiences through a cycle from autumn to summer. In the absence of programme notes, listeners were left to imagine their own connections between the music and Smith's novels.
Moore's Fall Falling used looping repetitions and slow-phase harmonies to create a meditative response to Smith's love of lists. Azmeh's Essays on Solitude featured throbbing rhythms and insistent layers of ostinato, lending a sinister intensity to the folk-tale of virgin sacrifice embedded in Smith's Spring.
Yeung's Inabsolute Zero
Yeung's Inabsolute Zero was particularly striking, with Winter's ghosts whispering and hovering in a play of texture. The piano grunted hollow, dulled by fingers on the strings, while violin bows stroked breathily over the fingerboard. The waltz from Shostakovich's Jazz Suite wandered in and out of earshot, creating a ravishing interplay of sound.
Performance and collaboration
The New European Ensemble, a moveable feast of a group that sometimes functions as a chamber orchestra but here performed as a septet, was a taut, unified force. Leadership passed fluidly between the undemonstratively excellent players. Smith read extracts from her novels between the musical pieces, visibly involved with every composition, as words and music met at the equinox of the novelist's fictional year.
According to the review, the concert exposed the acts of translation, mediation, and re-creation that occur when describing music in words. The project reversed the usual process, inviting music about words instead of words about music. The Seasonal Quartet concert will be at the Edinburgh book festival on 28 August.
