← News & Features
08 Nov 24 | Events
A Spark in the Darkness: Inspired by Sicilian Sulphur Mines
As the nights draw in and temperatures drop, the Castalian String Quartet promises to bring warmth to their upcoming concert on Tuesday, 26th November. The evening will feature a striking contemporary piece inspired by Sicilian sulphur mines, symbolised by the lighting of a match. Amid their current North American tour, we caught up with violinist and Castalian Quartet member Daniel Roberts to learn more about the remarkable performance ahead later this month:
At the heart of this recital will be one of the first performances of Francesco Antonioni’s Surfarara. Composed during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, we premiered Surfarara at the Wigmore Hall earlier this year before taking it to July’s Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival in Finland. It was there, in the light-bound stretches of northern Europe, a far cry from the sunless Sicilian sulphur mines that give the piece its title, that the Castalians first played atop a fire blanket; picture a wood-clad concert hall embraced by endless pine forests, buckets of water by our sides, health-and-safety officers up in arms and fretful stage-hands on standby. You see, this might be the only string quartet that requires its performers to light matches on the concert platform—a sensory masterstroke that immediately plunges the audience into the mysterious, often disconcerting depths of Surfarara. Amidst torrents of extended techniques and quick-fire passage work, soaring melodies quote from a Sicilian folk song of the same name, of which Antonioni writes: ‘It is at once both desperate and full of pride. The line ‘I have forgotten about my own life’ resonated deeply with me during lockdown.’
Alongside Francesco’s powerful work, the first half features Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s infectiously charming 5 Fantasiestücke, Op.5: succinct character pieces that showcase their composer’s invention, wit and ingenuity, while nodding with affection to his beloved Dvorak. Before bringing it to Oxford, we’re touring this work in the USA, a country where London-born Coleridge-Taylor was celebrated enough to earn the moniker ‘The African Mahler’ (his father was from Sierra Leone, his mother English) and an invite to meet President Roosevelt at the White House. Tragically, despite international fame, he would die, poverty-stricken, in Croydon at the age of 37. The Times obituary read: ‘The sudden death of Mr Coleridge-Taylor will be felt as a serious loss by all who are interested in musical matters.’ Delve into this music, and it’s hard to disagree with such sentiment.
The final piece in the programme needs little introduction. Op.127, the earliest of Beethoven’s fabled late string quartets, is one of the great achievements in Western Art—monumental in scale and with the grandest of openings, but thereafter unexpectedly intimate, especially in comparison to its E flat major cousins, such as the Eroica Symphony. This will be our first performance of the work—what feels a landmark moment in our quartet life—and the ideal way to mark the extension of our residency at the University of Oxford!
Daniel Roberts
2nd violinist, Castalian String Quartet
You can now book your tickets for the Castalian String Quartet’s upcoming concerts and pre-concert talks on Tuesday 26 November and Thursday 30 January with a special offer if you book both concerts at the same time. There will also be a two celebration concerts on Friday 9 May with a special offer if you book both concerts taking place on this date.
Presented by the Cultural Programme in association with the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, where the Castalian String Quartet are The Hans Keller String Quartet in Residence. Made possible thanks to The Cosman Keller Art & Music Trust.
08 Nov 24