Seasonal Quartet: Ali Smith and the New European Ensemble review – voice and music merge | Classical music

WWhy write lyrics about music, Hans Keller once asked, when you can write lyrics about music instead? His mid-century sound works were not much more than an experimental curiosity, but one that reveals the processes of translation, mediation and re-creation that we unconsciously create every time we describe the music we like or explain why music makes us cry. Revamping the process, this amazing concert by the Netherlands’ New European Ensemble (who will be attending the Edinburgh book festival next month) called for a song of words, as four authors responded to the writings of Ali Smith.

Connections – paths that intersect, patterns that repeat, stories and lives that overlap – bind the four books of Smith’s Seasonal Quartet. The project spans the web in new commissions from four female musicians: Australia’s Kate Moore, Hong Kong’s Alice Yeung, South Korea’s Seung-Won Oh, and Italy’s Sara Zamboni. Episodes written by Peter Maxwell Davies, Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Kinan Azmeh completed the series of stories and performances that took the audience around from autumn to summer.

Did the composers choose the books themselves? Do the works represent a tone or a specific response to Smith’s passages and sections? With no program documentation we were left to figure out our own connections. Smith’s love for the series found a meditative musical response in the repeated repetitions and slow sounds of Moore’s Downfall; Spring’s legend of virgin sacrifice inspired Azmeh’s Essays on Solitude, built around persistent ostinato bands – a modern-day Rite of Spring.

The highlight was Yeung’s Inabsolute Zero, where the ghosts of Winter whispered and wandered through the wet play: the piano hummed, strummed by fingers on the strings, the violin’s bows moved breathlessly on the finger, while a waltz from Shostakovich’s Jazz Suite wandered in and out.

A dynamic party of an ensemble (at times closer to a chamber orchestra, but here a septet), the New European Ensemble was dynamic, cohesive, deeply communicative as the leadership passed between their understated players. And how good it is to see Smith – reading book notes between songs – so clearly with each piece: a word and a musical meeting at the same time of the author’s fictional year.