Four Composers Respond to Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet
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- New European Ensemble staged a concert in which four commissioned composers — Australia's Kate Moore, Hong Kong's Alice Yeung, South Korea's Seung-Won Oh, and Italy's Sara Zamboni — responded to novels from Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet
- Alice Yeung's "Inabsolute Zero" was singled out as the most striking piece, with Winter's ghosts rendered in hollow piano textures and breathy violin strokes, interwoven with a wandering Shostakovich Jazz Suite waltz
- Kate Moore's "Fall Falling" mirrored Smith's love of lists through looping repetitions and slow-phase harmonies
- Kinan Azmeh's "Essays on Solitude" used insistent ostinato layers — likened to a "contemporary Rite of Spring" — to render Spring's folk-tale of virgin sacrifice
- The program also included pieces by Peter Maxwell Davies, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, and Azmeh, completing a sequence moving from autumn to summer
- Ali Smith read extracts from her novels between musical pieces, visibly engaged with every composition
- The New European Ensemble performed as a septet, described as a "taut, unified force" with leadership passing fluidly between players; the production travels to the Edinburgh book festival next month
Why it matters: The commission paired four female composers from four continents with a single literary source, an unusual model of cross-disciplinary production. The Edinburgh book festival booking signals organizers' confidence that literary audiences will embrace contemporary chamber music — broadening the potential reach beyond traditional classical concertgoers.
