Anselm McDonnell: The Expanded Violin

Rusted Sugar enters the world of intervals smaller than a semitone, taking traditional tonal chord progressions and setting them into a landscape of quartertones, sweet synthesisers, and funk rhythms. Swept Through the Floods and Lamento present powerful emotional journeys, Judith Ring following the turbulent ebbs and flows of environmental flooding disasters in the former, and the latter Kalevi Aho’s soulful tribute to the young Finnish violinist Sakari Laukola. Leo Chadburn’s De La Salle (Violins) occupies a calmer environment: a drifting soundscape that merges four violins into one united voice.

Ian Wilson’s Primavera takes the violin quartet in a different direction, creating a texture of agile and nervous echoes in response to paintings by the American artist Cy Twombly. Also responding to visual stimuli but turning again to the world of detail and small intervals, Lamb’s duo (in)tone seeks out the resultant vibrations from sounds in close proximity. Another Finnish ‘in memoriam’, Saariaho’s Nocturne is an intimate tribute to Lutosławski. McDonnell’s new work Genesis Cradle closes the concert, this time exploring alternative tunings through Just Intonation – intervals that are tuned to fit with the naturally occurring relationships in the harmonic series.