City of London Festival: Brodsky Quartet

Brodsky Quartet
Lore Lixenberg (mezzo-soprano)
Cathal Breslin (piano)

Philip Hammond - Chanson d'Automne
Elgar - Piano Quintet Op 84
Nigel Osborne and others - Trees, Walls, Cities for voice and string quartet (World première)

Brodsky Quartet return to Drapers’ Hall, the scene of their first success in the 2012 Festival to present the world première of Trees, Walls and Cities – a specially commissioned song-cycle which links the eight ‘walled’ cities of Derry, London, Utrecht, Berlin, Vienna, Dubrovnik, Nicosia and Jerusalem. Eight composers, Theo Verbey, Isidora Zebeljan, Gerald Resch, Yannis Kyriakides, Habib Shehadeh Hanna, Jocelyn Pook, Christopher Norby and Søren Nils Eichberg have worked with either an existing text or a neighbouring poet, with linking material created by Nigel Osborne. Northern Irish composer, Philip Hammond’s single movement work, Chanson d'Automne, for string quartet and mezzo soprano opens the concert and Elgar’s Piano Quintet, composed in 1918 at the end of the Great War and full of nostalgia for a world that had changed forever, completes the first half.

In partnership with the Walled City Music Festival
Supported by the PRS for Music Foundation and The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands