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We celebrate Quatuor Diotima’s thirtieth anniversary with a special concert that reflects their longstanding association with the University of York. The world premiere of Professor of Composition Thomas Simaku’s Sixth Quartet, Atomistic Compression, commissioned by Diotima for their anniversary, sits alongside the UK premiere of another Diotima thirtieth-anniversary commission, Towards a not yet remembered past, by Simaku’s former student, York alumnus and Grawemeyer Award-winning composer, Christian Mason. While Mason’s quartet reimagines highlights from the fourteenth-century Chantilly Codex, interleaving them with original material as a reflection on contemporaneity and what it means to be new, Simaku’s is firmly situated in the challenges of our present day: ‘a musical reflection on human suffering and the grim realities of our time,’ the inner world of music ‘reassembling’ aspects of the external world. This expressionist impulse is also the force behind Zemlinsky’s remarkable Second Quartet, a single-movement work of rich harmonies, soaring lyricism and fiercely intense emotion.
