Ligeti Quartet plays Wadada Leo Smith

Tickets £20 // Under 30 £6
Advance booking required

Post-concert talk:
BBC Radio 3 presenter and writer Kate Molleson sits in conversation with the iconic American trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith.

Ligeti Quartet:
Freya Goldmark violin
Patrick Dawkins violin
Richard Jones viola
Val Welbanks cello

Wadada Leo Smith (USA, 1941)
String Quartet No 3 (Black Church: A First World Gathering of the Spirit) (1995) 20’

Wadada Leo Smith (USA, 1941)
String Quartet No 17 (The Capitol, Washington D.C: An American Experiment with Democracy and Capitalism) (2024) 40’ UK Premiere

Click here to view programme note

Ligeti Quartet perform two large-scale works by the world-renowned, US-based trumpeter, multi-instrumentalist, composer and improviser, Wadada Leo Smith. This music is both intrinsically and explicitly political, written using his Ankhrasmation system of graphic musical notation in which the performers are asked to play with varying degrees of freedom.

The concert features the UK Premiere of Wadada Leo Smith’s most recently composed string quartet, No 17, which questions the relationship of civil society and the institutions of democracy while also pursuing hope after events such as those of January 6, 2021.

String Quartet No 3, Black Church, features on the Pulitzer Prize-winning four-disc album Ten Freedom Summers, which was inspired by the civil rights movement in the US and was composed intermittently over 34 years, beginning in 1977. Of the piece, Wadada comments, “The Black Church is the center and spiritual Light in African-American culture. My quartet celebrates those of culture and spirituality.”

Produced by hcmf// supported by Hinrichsen Foundation, Vaughan Williams Foundation, Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation and the hcmf// Friends

Photo credit: Louise Mason