ZRI - Bleeding Hearts and Other Harmonic Eccentricities

Maurice Ravel String quartet
Leoš Janáček String quartet no.1, ‘Kreutzer Sonata’
Erik Satie Gnossienne no.1
Django Reinhard Rythme futur

ZRI stands for Zum Roten Igel – Schubert’s local pub. The group grew out of a project to reimagine the Brahms clarinet quintet in the moment when it was born, into a Vienna saturated with the Hungarian Gypsy-band music that he loved so well. At the same time, their unique instrumentation, with santouri and accordion alongside the more familiar strings and clarinet, has resonances that reach far beyond the beguiling transgressions of Hungarian roots in Vienna.

The string quartets by Ravel and Janáček are cases in point. Maurice Ravel was the son of an inventor of machinery for Barnum’s circus, twice expelled from the Paris Conservatoire. Janáček for his part was from a village background, got expelled from college in Prague, and his extraordinary originality was only recognised in his sixties. Eastern European traditional music was always fundamental to Janáček, but Ravel and Satie also experienced it at the 1889 Paris Great Exhibition, where among other things they experienced the same bands that Brahms knew in Vienna.

The programme will also include other transcriptions of the earliest recordings of Eastern European traditional music.

'an intensity without compromise… ZRI present an interpretation which radically questions our ways of listening… a delicate invitation to let go of the oppressive might of the previously heard.'

Tickets £17.50 (inc £2.50 booking fee per ticket)