New European Ensemble Premieres Smith-Inspired Works
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- New European Ensemble from the Netherlands staged a concert where four newly commissioned pieces responded to novels from Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet, with the group functioning as a septet for the occasion
- Kate Moore (Australia), Alice Yeung (Hong Kong), Seung-Won Oh (South Korea) and Sara Zamboni (Italy) composed the new works, alongside pieces by Peter Maxwell Davies, Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Kinan Azmeh
- Alice Yeung's Inabsolute Zero was singled out as the concert's most striking piece, pairing ghostly textures and a hollowed piano timbre with a wandering Shostakovich Jazz Suite waltz responding to Smith's Winter
- Kate Moore's Fall Falling used looping repetitions and slow-phase harmonies to mirror Smith's 'love of a list,' while Kinan Azmeh's Essays on Solitude built insistent ostinato layers around Spring's folk-tale of virgin sacrifice
- Ali Smith read extracts from her four novels between musical performances, visibly engaged with each piece, as the programme traced a seasonal cycle from autumn to summer reflecting the quartet's themes of interconnectedness
- The ensemble is set to travel to the Edinburgh book festival next month with the same programme
Why it matters: Four female composers from four continents turned Ali Smith's interconnected Seasonal Quartet into new sonic territory, and the ensemble's upcoming Edinburgh book festival appearance extends this cross-disciplinary experiment to a literary audience that may not typically encounter contemporary chamber composition.
