Commissioned by Kronos Quartet for the Celebrate Brooklyn Festival. Premiere 12th March 2009 at the MusicNOW Festival and 18th July 2009 in Prospect Park Brooklyn.Bryce Dessner is a composer/guitarist/curator based in NewYork City. He has received widespread acclaim as a composer and guitarist for the improvising new music quartet Clogs. Bryce has performed and/or recorded with some of the world’s most creative musicians including songwritersSufjan Stevens Bon Iver and Antony Hegarty Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo composers Steve Reich Philip Glass Nico Muhly and Michael Gordon the contemporary ensembles Kronos Quartet the Bang on a Can All-Stars andvisual artist Matthew Ritchie. 

Unlike many of Kaija Saariaho’s other works Terra Memoria has no electronic extensions but uses the traditional String Quartet to explore the mutability and changelessness of memories of ‘thosedeparted’. Kaija Saariaho is a contemporary Finnish composer living and working in Paris and considered to be part of the so-called ‘French Spectralist’ school of composition. She gained international renown forher first opera l’Amour Du Loin and continues a prolific compositional life with a wide range of international performances.

Par ADES THOMAS. Composed in 1994 and now firmly established as part of the contemporary string quartet repertoire, Arcadiana is one of Thomas Adès’s early masterpieces. Six of its seven movements evoke various vanished or vanishing idylls. The odd-numbered movements are all aquatic. I might be the ballad of some lugubrious gondolier; III takes a title and a figuration from a Schubert Lied; in V a ship is seen swirling away to L’Isle Joyeuse; VII is the River of Oblivion. The second and sixth movements inhabit pastoral Arcadias, respectively: Mozart’s ‘Kingdom of Night’, and more local fields. The joker in this pack is the fourth movement, the literal dead centre: Poussin’s tomb bearing the inscription ‘Even in Arcady am I’. / Ensemble Music / Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes

Original version commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Arts · Revised version commissioned in 2015 by Raidió Teilifís Eireann and the Wigmore Hall, with the support of André Hoffmann, president of the Fondation Hoffmann, a Swiss grant-making foundation / Quatuor A Cordes

A grim commentary on the contemporary Middle East Lamentation and Satire is in the composer's words born out of a reaction to a part of the world that is over the edge. Advanced Level.