Event 

Intimate Voices
ENSŌ STRING QUARTET

Friday, March 12, 2010 | 7:30 PM - 10:30 PM
Wellspring Theatre - EPIC Center - Kalamazoo, MI

Maureen Nelson, violin | John Marcus, violin
Melissa Reardon, viola | Richard Belcher, cello

with Abhijit Sengupta, viola and Julia Sengupta, cello

Scored for double string quartet and recorded tape, Different Trains is American composer Steve Reich’s rumination on the horrors of World War II, during which he traveled by train between New York and Los Angeles. Later in life, it occurred to him that as a Jew, he would have been travelling on a very different train had he been living in Europe, and the piece incorporates recordings of Holocaust survivors recalling their experiences. Karim Al-Zand’s elegiac string sextet was composed in response to the tragic news that his cousin had become a civilian casualty of the Iraq War, and Sibelius’ darkly brooding “Intimate Voices” provides a poetic link to the haunting voices heard in Different Trains.