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With Different Trains, commissioned by the Kronos Quartet and written in 1988, the American minimalist composer Steve Reich transformed an event of contemporary history into a musical work of art. The “different trains” tell of his childhood, during which he travelled many times across the American continent in order to commute between his separated parents, while at the same time Jewish children in Europe were being deported by train to concentration camps. Reich, who is himself Jewish, superimposes the sounds and rhythms of moving trains with tape recordings of eyewitnesses in a fascinating manner, and thus commemorates the shocking simultaneity of completely divergent realities. Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross was composed in 1787 for a Good Friday service in Cadiz in southern Spain. In their meditative and timeless grandeur, the (almost) exclusively slow movements are among Haydn’s most poignant works.
With Different Trains, commissioned by the Kronos Quartet and written in 1988, the American minimalist composer Steve Reich transformed an event of contemporary history into a musical work of art. The “different trains” tell of his childhood, during which he travelled many times across the American continent in order to commute between his separated parents, while at the same time Jewish children in Europe were being deported by train to concentration camps. Reich, who is himself Jewish, superimposes the sounds and rhythms of moving trains with tape recordings of eyewitnesses in a fascinating manner, and thus commemorates the shocking simultaneity of completely divergent realities. Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross was composed in 1787 for a Good Friday service in Cadiz in southern Spain. In their meditative and timeless grandeur, the (almost) exclusively slow movements are among Haydn’s most poignant works.
One instrument crops up with striking frequency in French music: the harp. Magdalena Hoffmann, in Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane, invokes this special Debussyan inflection on her instrument, joined by a string quartet. She also creates a close but delicate exchange with the violin in Camille Saint-Saëns’s Fantaisie. But no less essential to the special French sound is the flute: when it enters an intimate dialogue with the viola in Ibert’s Interludes, the conversation takes place against the undulating ground of a harp. Wave-like arpeggios for the harp are also heard in Quintet for Harp, Flute, Violin, Viola and Cello by the composer and admiral Jean Cras, a work perhaps inspired by his long journeys at sea. The 20th-century music of Cras, Debussy and Ibert receives an exciting contemporary counterpart in Guillaume Connesson’s String Quartet, composed in 2008.
One instrument crops up with striking frequency in French music: the harp. Magdalena Hoffmann, in Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane, invokes this special Debussyan inflection on her instrument, joined by a string quartet. She also creates a close but delicate exchange with the violin in Camille Saint-Saëns’s Fantaisie. But no less essential to the special French sound is the flute: when it enters an intimate dialogue with the viola in Ibert’s Interludes, the conversation takes place against the undulating ground of a harp. Wave-like arpeggios for the harp are also heard in Quintet for Harp, Flute, Violin, Viola and Cello by the composer and admiral Jean Cras, a work perhaps inspired by his long journeys at sea. The 20th-century music of Cras, Debussy and Ibert receives an exciting contemporary counterpart in Guillaume Connesson’s String Quartet, composed in 2008.
