26.4.2025

Kai Nieminen: From Ancient Times… Ludwig van Beethoven in memoriam… motifs from op. 130

Kai Nieminen: From Ancient Times… Ludwig van Beethoven in memoriam… motifs from op. 130

Q Quartet:
Anna Bennett & Frederick Jones, viulu
Tristan Apperley, alttoviulu
Alistair Ligertwood, sello

26.4.2025 klo 19.30 Gustav Adolfs Kyrka, Liverpool, UK

Kustantaja: United Music Publishing 2025

Kai Nieminen’s new quartet in one movement has been written (like his fifth, sixth and seventh) for Q Quartets. It takes its starting points from fragments of one of Beethoven’s late quartets, and from some lines from Marlowe’s tragedy, Edward II, ‘My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns, shall with their goat feet dance the antic hay’. The piece is about fragmentary memories of music and dance, memories that are tinged with nostalgia and outright sadness. In Marlowe, the dancers’ goat feet suggest the benign and sometimes slightly clownish world of bucolic, but, as we know, Edward’s end was very far from happy. The Beethoven material is also dance-like, coming from the third movement of Op.130 a minuet whose playing instruction is ‘with movement, but not too much – a little like a scherzo.’ So, happy, but not too happy, or like a memory of happiness. And the happiness here ends with wintry, spectral chords separated by prolonged silences like gravestones standing in a cold necropolis.