Solem Quartet

Amy Tress – violin
William Newell – violin
Stephen Upshaw – viola
Stephanie Tress – cello

Henriëtte Bosmans
String Quartet
        Allegro molto moderato – Lento – Allegro molto

Jonny Greenwood
Suite from There will be Blood:
        i Oil
       ii HW/Hope of New Fields
       iii Future Markets
       iv Prospectors Quartet
       v Detuned Orchestra

Interval of 20 minutes

Steve Reich
Different Trains:  
        i America – Before the War
        ii Europe – During the War
        iii After the War

This concert will finish around 9:20pm

Solem Quartet presents music by 20th-century Dutch composer Henriëtte Bosmans, Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, and renowned American minimalist Steve Reich.

Henriëtte Bosmans’ only quartet (1927) is a highly emotive work in three short movements. All four instruments enjoy lyrical and heart-wrenching melodies, culminating in pulsating rhythmic energy that drives us towards the third movement’s climax.

Jonny Greenwood’s Suite draws from his 2007 film score for There Will Be Blood starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a 19th-century American oil magnate. Greenwood’s genre-bending music ingeniously depicts the film’s intense psychological drama, full of unsettling beauty and cold-blooded aggression.

Steve Reich’s Different Trains is built on an electronic soundscape of recorded trains, sirens, bells, and spoken voices which become melodies in the string quartet parts. Pondering his own Jewish heritage, Reich paints a vivid picture of the trains he took as a child in America during WW2 – a stark contrast to the holocaust trains he could have experienced had he been born in Europe.