The New European Ensemble has a reputation to uphold when it comes to exciting interdisciplinary projects. For this concert performance, the company is joining forces with one of today’s best writers, the Scottish Ali Smith. With her urgent, contemporary ‘seasonal quartet‘, Smith has reached millions of audiences in recent years. Four female composers are writing new works based on Smith’s novels Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. The NEuE is alternating these new pieces with three existing compositions.
Since 2016, Ali Smith has written four novels in five years on contemporary themes, from Brexit, migration and populism to generational differences, ecology and feminism. Each novel also features a forgotten female artist. At the request of the NEuE, Seung-Won Oh, Kate Moore, Alice Yeung and Sara Zamboni have each written a new ensemble piece inspired by one of these novels. Ali Smith was enthusiastic about the project from the start and will be reciting appropriate passages from her quartet of novels during the concert.
Emlyn Stam, artistic director and violist of the NEuE, explains what makes these four composers so special for him. “Seung-Won Oh makes atmospheric, charged music with long lines, in which she often makes a connection with her Korean background. You can hear that, for example, in the characteristic glissandi and in the instrumentation. Kate Moore works with small cells of notes and a strong rhythmic structure. With her, the material is often quite sparse and looks simple, but something always comes loose when you play it for an audience. It is inspired music, there is a spirit in it.”
“Sara Zamboni is a student of Martijn Padding. Although her music has a very unique character, I think you can hear that: she writes very precisely, with refined instrumentation and bright colours. Alice Yeung, originally from Hong Kong, writes virtuoso, fast music, with many contrasts. On the other hand: she is still young and her style is developing. We were very impressed by an earlier piece of hers and we like to be surprised.”
The Icelandic Anna Thorvaldsdottir, based in London, makes evocative, intimate and intense music that is performed worldwide. Her Spectra (2017) consists of six short, consecutively played movements. The work has a predominantly subdued atmosphere and is constructed from long, sometimes lyrical lines on the one hand and thin, fragile flageolet sounds on the other, which interlock in an ingenious way. Thorvaldsdottir describes her music as ‘an ecosystem of materials that are brought from one performer to the next’. As a listener, you experience how your motifs or ideas blossom and are taken over by another instrument.
Peter Maxwell Davies, one of the most eminent British composers of the last century, based his string quartet A sad paven for these distracted tymes on a keyboard work of the same name by composer Thomas Tomkins from 1649. Tomkins was organist at Worcester Cathedral and court composer to King Charles I. During the English Civil War, his cathedral was desecrated and his organ badly damaged, and shortly after the execution of King Charles I he wrote his ‘sad pavane’ – with some justification. Davies adapted the beautiful melody into a statement of his own, as the compulsory work for the International String Quartet Competition ‘Premio Paolo Borciani’ in 2005. There was a lot going on in the world then too – you could almost forget. But that we live in ‘distracted tymes’ today is beyond dispute.
Kinah Azmeh composed his piece ‘On solitude’ in 2021, during the pandemic. It is part of his work Essays on solitude and other ambiguous emotions for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, which he made on commission from the American Soli Chamber Ensemble. Azmeh, a much sought-after solo clarinetist himself, is originally from Syria, but has been based in New York for over twenty years. Corona put a stop to his busy travel schedule and in his apartment in Brooklyn, with his wife and newborn baby, he found a form of loneliness that brought him peace. The soft and fragile music resonates irrevocably with the still precarious situation in Syria, and also with the European approach to refugees that Ali Smith thematizes in her novels.
The NEuE developed this project at an early stage together with Het Nationale Theater and director Eric de Vroedt. The theater performance De Seizoenen, based on Smith’s novels, will premiere at the end of this month during the Holland Festival.