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Peter Eötvös's The Sirens Cycle debuts at Wigmore Hall with the Calder Quartet and Audrey Luna

Sep. 08, 2016

Peter Eötvös's <em>The Sirens Cycle</em> debuts at Wigmore Hall with the Calder Quartet and Audrey Luna

Peter Eötvös’s new work for soprano and string quartet, The Sirens Cycle, receives its world premiere on October 1 at London’s Wigmore Hall with soprano Audrey Luna and the Calder Quartet. The work was jointly commissioned by the Tonhalle Society Zürich, Alte Oper Frankfurt, Centro Nacional de Difusion Musical (Madrid), IRCAM-Centre Pompidou (Paris), ProQuartet-Centre européen de musique de chamber (Paris), the Südwestrundfunk (Germany) and Wigmore Hall (London). 

The Sirens Cycle consists of three movements for string quartet with soprano and two electronic interludes. Eötvös writes:

The negation of song in Frank Kafka’s “The Silence of the Sirens” inspired me to compose a work reflecting on song itself. I took an extract from Ulysses by James Joyce and requested IRCAM in Paris to transform the text through spectral analysis into pitches, note values and tone colours. In the first movement, I strictly adhered to the resulting note sequence, but increasingly became liberated from it during the progress of the work. I linked the quartet movements with interludes evoking audible associations with the song of the sirens.

A European tour of The Sirens Cycle follows the premiere, with performances on October 2 at the Tonhalle-Gesellschaft Zürich, October 3 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte in Madrid, October 5 at the Alte Oper Frankfurt, October 12 at the IRCAM-Centre Pompidou in Paris, and October 15 and 16 at the Donaueschingen Musiktage.

For more information on Peter Eötvös, visit schott-music.com.

Peter Eötvös
The Sirens Cycle (2016)
for coloratura soprano and string quartet
text (Eng, Ancient Greek, Ger) by James Joyce, Homer and Franz Kafka
45’

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