Seasonal Quartet: A Review of Ali Smith and the New European Ensemble – Words and Music Connected | classical music

WHans Keller once asked, why write words about music, when can you write music about music instead? His essays in Mid-Century Sound were little more than experimental curiosities, but they revealed the acts of translation, mediation, and re-creation that we mindlessly perform every time we describe our favorite symphony or explain why a song makes us cry. In contrast to that process, this strange concert by the New European Ensemble in the Netherlands (which travels to the Edinburgh Book Festival next month) called for music around words, with four composers responding to Ali Smith’s novels.

Connections—paths that cross, patterns that repeat, stories and lives that resonate—connect the four books that make up Smith’s Seasonal Quartet. This project expands the Internet further with new commissions from four composers: Australian Kate Moore, Alice Young from Hong Kong, Seung Won Oh from South Korea, and Sarah Zamboni from Italy. Scores by Peter Maxwell Davies, Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Kanan Azma completed the narrative and performance sequences to take the audience through a cycle from autumn to summer.

Did the composers choose their novels themselves? Do the works represent a generalized soundscape or a particular response to Smith’s spoken passages and episodes? In the absence of program notes, we are left to imagine our own connections. Smith’s love of the roll found a meditative musical answer in the loops and slow-phase harmonies of Moore’s Fall. The springtime folk tale of virgin sacrifice gave a sinister intensity to the pulsating rhythms of grandeur’s essays on solitude, built in insistent layers of ostinato—a contemporary ritual of spring.

Most interesting was Young’s “Absolute Zero,” in which the ghosts of winter whispered and hovered in an enchanting play of texture: a piano snored hollow, dulled by fingers on the strings, and violin bows beat breathlessly on the fingerboard, while a waltz from Shostakovich’s jazz suite wandered in and out of hearing range.

A moving feast for an ensemble (sometimes more akin to a chamber orchestra, but here an ensemble), the New European Ensemble was a unified and cohesive force, communicating seamlessly with leadership passing between its excellent players inconspicuously. And how wonderful it is to see Smith – reading excerpts from the novels between the music – clearly engaged in each piece: words and music meet in the equanimity of a fictional novel.