Ligeti Quartet

One of the UK’s leading contemporary ensembles, the Ligeti Quartet celebrate legend Steve Reich’s 90th Birthday.

They present a special programme featuring the composer’s stunning work for string quartet and tape, ‘Different Trains’.

As a child in the 1940’s, Reich travelled by train across America. Many years later, he contemplated the contrast between his own experiences and those of Jews in Eastern Europe at the same time. He imagined what his life could have been had he been born in Europe rather than America; what those train rides would have meant, and the horror of the final destinations. This became the core impetus for the ‘Different Trains’, which was commissioned by the world-famous Kronos Quartet in 1988. Writing the work prompted him to visit Yale’s Holocaust archive. There, he recorded survivors’ testimonies, which are woven through the piece.

Ligeti will also perform a brand-new arrangement of Riley’s ‘Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band’ – a cornerstone recording of the late 60s psychedelic era.