Strings in the Earth and Air

Strings in the Earth and Air is a festival of brilliant young string quartets from the UK, and a celebration of new music composed for string quartet. Curated by John Woolrich, Jeremy Thurlow and Tim Watts, it features music by a kaleidoscope of composers from the brilliant and pioneering Ruth Crawford-Seeger to living minotaur Harrison Birtwistle, from Freya Waley-Cohen to Philip Cashian and from Louise Drewitt to Eleanor Alberga.

We’re thrilled to present the Echéa Quartet, the Ligeti Quartet and the Benyounes Quartet in three artfully shaped programmes full of power, intimacy and surprise. Two threads run through the whole series: Woolrich’s recent ‘Book of Inventions’, and the music of Harrison Birtwistle.

My own contributions are two very different pieces. First, my response to the searching, teasing exploration of character and aliveness in Virginia Woolf’s amazing Orlando, in the form of a quartet in six strongly contrasted snapshots – Memory is the seamstress.

Second, a new piece, Understory, a song of forgotten places and marginal voices, written for the Echéa Quartet and receiving its first performance.

Originally these programmes were planned as concerts, but after postponing twice due to Covid regulations we’ve decided to film them and then release them online later in the summer. Watch this space!

Fauré’s final visions

I’ve been asked to research and present another programme for Radio 3’s CD Review – the part called Building a Library, where the reviewer considers all the available recordings of a piece, guides you through them and makes a recommendation. Last year I looked at Messiaen’s La Nativité, and this time it’s a truly extraordinary work by Gabriel Fauré, written in his 80th year, his (only) String Quartet.

Fauré’s music takes us on a long and fascinating journey from the delicious and apparently effortless poise of his earlier music to something almost completely opposite – dark, tortuous and beset equally by doubts and by the determination to go on which sometimes seems to me to foreshadow Samuel Beckett. These qualities emerge in Fauré’s music before and during the First World War, and then in his very last works (including the String Quartet, the last of all, from 1923-4) this sense of striving acquires a kind of luminosity which is absolutely unforgettable.

Like other late Fauré, it works its magic slowly, and doesn’t give everything away at once. Preparing this programme, and listening to the piece repeatedly in various different performances was an ideal way to get this music under my skin. It says a lot for the piece that having now heard it umpteen times I’ve not become in the least tired of it, and in fact it’s now one of my Desert Island discs!

The programme goes out on Saturday 28 March at 9.30am on Radio 3. It can be heard for one week following on Listen Again on the Radio 3 website, and can also be downloaded as a podcast – for further information see  CD Review/Building a Library.