From Reich to Kate Bush: a fusion of voice and string quartet

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From Arnold Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2 to Elvis Costello’s The Juliet Letters with the Brodsky Quartet and beyond, compelling alliances between voice and string quartet have existed for well over a century. This engaging concert of music by Steve Reich and Kate Bush, performed by the Solem Quartet with singer, composer and multi-instrumentalist Alice Zawadzki, demonstrated how powerful and effective such combinations can be. 

Part of Kings Place’s Memory Unwrapped series, the first half featured Reich’s Different Trains for string quartet and tape, in which recorded voices play a central role. 

Composed in 1988, the thirty-minute work contrasts Reich’s own childhood memories – travelling between New York and Los Angeles in the late 1930s and early 40s with his governess Virginia Mitchell – with the contemporaneous journeys of European Jews forced onto trains bound for Nazi death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka. 

The challenge for any quartet performing this work is twofold: to coordinate the live players precisely with the fixed tape while giving each line expressive vitality. While violinists Amy Tress and William Newell evoked the train’s mechanical rhythms and sounds, violist Stephen Upshaw and cellist Stephanie Tress drew their musical cues from the prerecorded speech patterns. They not only matched the tone and rhythm of each phrase but also captured its gestural character. Upshaw lent an almost lilting lyricism to Virginia’s voice in phrases such as ’from Chicago to New York’, while Tress imbued Pullman porter Lawrence Davis’s forthright expressions (such as ’the crack [i.e., the best] train from New York’) with more ballast and bite. The character of the playing thus mirrored the voices themselves. 

When the narrative darkened in the second movement, with Holocaust survivors recounting wartime experiences, Solem projected the music’s dissonant chords with visceral force, using sweeping down-bows close to the bridge. The sustained chord at the movement’s close signalled trauma, desperation and exhaustion. The bittersweet final movement – where exile in America cannot erase painful memories – was also vividly realised. 

The presence of Alice Zawadzki after the interval offered welcome contrast. The first three songs, composed, arranged and sung by Zawadzki, drew on diverse influences: folk elements blended with spectral harmonics in ‘Ring of Fire’ (unrelated to the Johnny Cash song), blues-inflected riffs coloured ‘My Boy of the Birds’, while diminished scale and octatonic inflections in the Polish-inspired ‘Pragnienie’ brought its sound world closer to Bartók. 

Solem Quartet’s interpretations of Kate Bush songs, via William Newell’s subtly crafted arrangements, are already familiar from their 2021 Orchid Classics debut album The Four Quarters, which included the highly evocative ‘And Dream of Sheep’. Zawadzki’s voice proved an ideal partner for the five Bush songs that closed the programme. Delicate pizzicatos underpinned the restrained intensity of ‘The Man with the Child in His Eyes’, while the addition of Zawadzki’s folklike violin in ‘Jig of Life’ projected extra resonance. The gradual build of ‘Running Up That Hill’ suggested a measured jog that culminated in a powerful sprint with Tress and Newell’s violins leading the way. 

Vocal and string quartet collaborations can sometimes feel uneasy, but the synergy between Solem and Zawadzki throughout this concert felt natural, organic, compelling and convincing. Presented in this way, one wonders why the medium is not explored more often.

Photo: Kings Place