Mivos Quartet: Sarah Hennies

Tickets: Standard £22 // Solidarity £28.60 // Under 30 £7
Advance booking required

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Post-concert talk:
Following the UK premiere of her string quartet Borrowed Light, BBC Radio 3 presenter and writer Kate Molleson sits in conversation with hcmf// 2025 Composer in Residence, Sarah Hennies.

Mivos Quartet:
Olivia De Prato violin
Rachel Koblyakov violin
Victor Lowrie Tafoya viola
Nathan Watts cello

Sarah Hennies (USA, 1979)
Borrowed Light (2023) 60’ UK Premiere

Click here to view programme note

The Mivos Quartet, one of America’s most daring and uncompromising new-music ensembles, presents the UK premiere of Borrowed Light – an exquisite and quietly radical concert-length work by Sarah Hennies, Composer in Residence at hcmf// 2025.

Hennies has emerged as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary experimental music, celebrated for works that probe the edges of perception, identity and memory. Her practice often blurs the line between the physical and the psychological, asking listeners not simply to hear sound, but to inhabit it. In Borrowed Light, this approach unfolds with striking clarity.

The piece moves with patience and restraint, its fragile textures and shifting resonances creating a music that feels at once intimate and architectural. Rather than relying on dramatic gesture, Hennies builds intensity through repetition, persistence, and the careful accumulation of detail. This slow-burn aesthetic is not about arrival but about transformation: a gradual recalibration of how we listen, as tiny variations take on profound weight.

In doing so, Borrowed Light becomes a kind of sonic meditation – a work that suspends time and amplifies attention, revealing how sound can illuminate inner states of being. Both austere and deeply human, it reflects Hennies’ wider commitment to exploring the politics of listening and the ways in which sound shapes our sense of self and world.

For Mivos, whose fearless performances have redefined the possibilities of the string quartet, Borrowed Light is a perfect vehicle – an invitation to audiences to experience listening as both discipline and revelation.

Produced by hcmf// supported by hcmf// Benefactor Martin Staniforth

Borrowed Light is commissioned by Darmstädter Ferienkurse (Darmstadt Summer Course)

Photo: Sarah Hennies © Mara Baldwin