Why write words about music, Hans Keller once asked, when you could just write music about music instead? His mid-century essays in sound were never more than an experimental curiosity, but one that exposed the acts of translation, mediation and re-creation we undertake without thinking every time we describe our favourite symphony or explain why a song makes us cry. Reversing the process, this curious concert by the Netherlands’ New European Ensemble (which travels to the Edinburgh book festival next month) invited music about words, as four composers responded to novels by Ali Smith.
Interconnectedness – paths that intersect, patterns that repeat, stories and lives that echo – binds the four books of Smith’s Seasonal Quartet. This project spins that web still wider in new commissions from four female composers: Australia’s Kate Moore, Alice Yeung from Hong Kong, South Korean Seung-Won Oh, and Italy’s Sara Zamboni. Pieces by Peter Maxwell Davies, Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Kinan Azmeh completed the sequence of narration and performance taking audiences through a cycle from autumn to summer.
Did composers choose their own novels? Do the works represent a generalised soundscape or a particular response to Smith’s spoken passages and episodes? In the absence of programme notes we were left to imagine our own connections. Smith’s love of a list found meditative musical answer in the looping repetitions and slow-phase harmonies of Moore’s Fall Falling; Spring’s embedded folk-tale of virgin sacrifice lent a sinister intensity to the throbbing rhythms of Azmeh’s Essays on Solitude, built up in insistent layers of ostinato – a contemporary Rite of Spring.
Most interesting was Yeung’s Inabsolute Zero, where Winter’s ghosts whispered and hovered in a ravishing play of texture: piano grunting hollow, dulled by fingers on the strings, violin bows stroking breathily over the fingerboard, while the waltz from Shostakovich’s Jazz Suite wandered in and out of earshot.
A moveable feast of a group (sometimes closer to a chamber orchestra, but here a septet), the New European Ensemble were a taut, unified force, communicating fluidly as leadership passed between their undemonstratively excellent players. And how brilliant to see Smith – reading extracts from the novels between the music – so visibly involved with every piece: words and music meeting at the equinox of the novelist’s fictional year.
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