Memory Unwrapped: Solem Quartet & Alice Zawadzki - Reich/Zawadzki/Bush

As part of Memory Unwrapped and our celebration of Steve Reich’s 90th birthday, the Solem Quartet perform Steve Reich’s iconic Different Trains, a deeply personal work; and Alice Zawadzki joins them for a set of her own songs which speak to her own story, in a style that is uniquely modern. Offering dialogue to Alice’s compositions, songs by the visionary Kate Bush complete the night in celebration.
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Join the Solem Quartet and Alice Zawadzki for a concert of personal histories told through music, spanning time and genre.

Steve Reich’s ‘Different Trains’ is one of the great works of the twentieth-century quartet repertoire. Reflecting on his journeys across America as a child in the 1930s and 1940s, Reich soon thought of his Jewish counterparts in Europe who would have ridden ‘very different trains’. Creating an aural cornucopia of recorded testimony, train sounds and string quartet, this compelling work creates a huge emotional impact.

With themes of modern and invented folklore, impish night-time grooves, hallucinatory tales of feline ghosts, first love, obsession and the sublime, Alice Zawadzki’s music has been described as ‘tender in spirit and defiantly anti-genre, hooking her all-embracing vision to a questing musical curiosity and the freedom inherent in jazz’ (Jazzwise). The award-winning singer, multi-instrumentalist and composer joins the Solem Quartet for a set of her songs in new arrangements for voice and string quartet. Kate Bush’s extraordinary output spans themes of love, growth and parenthood; selected songs are heard here in arrangements by Will Newell, which add an expansive soundworld to Bush’s visionary songwriting.

This event will last approximately 90 minutes, including an interval.