Trees, Walls, Vienna

The Brodsky Quartet is going on a journey this Thursday evening at Kings Place. Journeys are a familiar trope at Lieder recitals: less so string quartets. This Thursday's concert kicks off a three-night series entitled Trees, Walls, Cities, in which Kings Place's resident quartet and various collaborators invoke a musical psychogeography, from Derry to London, Utrecht to Berlin, Vienna to Dubrovnik and Nicosia to Jerusalem. Each is a city centred on a wall or a green space: each has a story to tell.

The first concert features an eclectic group of songs, performed by mezzo soprano Loré Lixenberg, which reaches Schubert's Vienna with a performance of his 'Rosamunde' Quartet from 1824. The second part of the concert, however, features Trees, Walls, Cities, a new song cycle by Nigel Osborne 'and others' comprising eight songs which take us through those urban centres. The Quartet then returns to Vienna on Friday with a sequence of works around and about the former Habsburg hub.

Vienna is clearly on the Brodsky's mind at the moment, as they're mid way through their cycle of Zemlinsky's String Quartets at the Hampstead Arts Festival. If you've missed the first two parts, you can catch musicologist Anthony Beaumont on the subject of Zemlinsky's four quartets – written between 1896 to 1936 – on 20 November at the Austrian Cultural Forum. The Brodsky Quartet then performs the Third Quartet at St. Stephen's in Hampstead on 1 December, before a performance of the Fourth Quartet on 3 December.

Tweet