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An internationally acclaimed string quartet is coming to Warrenpoint Town Hall next month for a concert that brings together some of the most powerful and emotionally charged music ever written for the screen.
Presented by Newry Chamber Music, Piatti Quartet will perform in the Town Hall on Saturday, 14 March at 1pm. It will be a programme built around iconic works that have left their mark on cinema, from Samuel Barber's haunting Adagio for Strings to pieces by Philip Glass, Ravel, Shostakovich and Radiohead guitarist turned film composer Jonny Greenwood. It promises to be an afternoon that will resonate with classical music lovers and film fans in equal measure.
The concert opens with Philip Glass's String Quartet No. 3, drawn from his soundtrack to Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters, the 1985 biographical drama directed by Paul Schrader. From there, the programme moves to Jonny Greenwood's spare and spectral quartet from Paul Thomas Anderson's Oscar-winning There Will Be Blood, a piece that demonstrated just how far Greenwood's composing talent extends beyond his work with Radiohead.
Ravel's String Quartet, familiar to many from its appearance in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums, also features on the bill, as does Samuel Barber's deeply poignant Adagio for Strings, Op. 11. It is a work that needs little introduction, having become one of cinema's most recognisable expressions of loss and grief, perhaps most memorably accompanying the helicopter scenes in Oliver Stone's Platoon.
The concert closes with Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8, composed in Dresden in 1960 while the composer was working on the Soviet-East German film Five Days-Five Nights. Written against the backdrop of a city still scarred by wartime bombing, the piece carries a weight and drama that has seen it used across numerous film soundtracks since.
The Piatti Quartet, Michael Trainor and Emily Holland on violin, Miguel Sobrinho on viola and Jessie Ann Richardson on cello, are Resident Quartet at Kings Place in London. Since their prizewinning performances at the 2015 Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition they have performed at some of the world's great venues including the Wigmore Hall, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Flagey Radio Hall in Brussels and the Aldeburgh Festival. Composer Julian Anderson has described them as "living treasures of chamber music", The Strad has praised their "profound music making", and critic David Rowe has called them "surely one of the very best ever".
Tickets are £20 for general admission and £10 for under 18s, available at ticketsource.co.uk/newry-chamber-music.
Further information can be found at newrychambermusic.org.
