Spring Tour with the Bridge Quartet

I’m delighted to be teaming up with my friends the Bridge String Quartet again for a spring mini-tour. We first performed Haydn’s Seven Last Words in 2019 and have revived it each Easter since. Haydn originally wrote the work for the Good Friday service at the the Oratorio de la Santa Cueva in Cadiz in 1786 and we follow his original intention by interspersing its nine movements with spoken word readings, in our case classic and contemporary poetry by Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Philip Larkin, Mary Oliver and many others. Forty years later Beethoven had just recovered from serious illness when he wrote his immortal late quartet in A minor opus 132 and called the central slow movement “A holy song of thanksgiving to the deity from a convalescent recovering from illness”. We intersperse the movements with readings from his letters and diaries and poetry by TS Eliot, who cited the work as a particular inspiration for his own Four Quartets.

Tuesday 21st March, 7pm (London venue TBC) - Beethoven’s Holy Song of Thanks

§Thursday 30th March, 7pm Chester Road Baptist Church, Sutton Coldfield, B73 5HU - Haydn’s Seven Last Words

*Friday 31st March, 7pm Holy Trinity Church, Dilton Marsh, Wilts BA13 4DP - Haydn’s Seven Last Words

*Saturday 1st April, 7pm St Mary’s Church, Boyton, Wilts, BA12 0SS - Beethoven’s Holy Song of Thanks

*Tickets £15/£8 via boyton7lw@gmail.com

§Free with retiring collection