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Zephyr Quartet Coming to Waterside Workers Hall

By: May. 19, 2016
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After a sell-out world premiere season at Queen's Theatre in 2014, South Australia's Zephyr Quartet will re-imagine another heritage listed venue when, in association with Vitalstatistix, they bring their celebrated performance project Between Light back for a second outing - this time in Port Adelaide's beautiful Waterside Workers Hall from June 29 - July 3, 2016. Bookings: vitalstatistix.com.au.

An intimate conversation between music, light and space - Between Light challenges conventional concert and recital formats by presenting five specially commissioned works by leading Australian composers in an immersive promenade-style - in which the audience moves with the Quartet through the venue.

Each composition is housed inside its own 'space', with esteemed lighting designer Geoff Cobham returning to the project and creating separate installations that respond uniquely, using varying notions of light and dark, to each piece of music.

The genesis of Between Light was the Italian art term chiaroscuro - used to describe the effect of contrasting areas of light and dark in a painting or drawing. In late 2013, Zephyr Quartet commissioned five renowned contemporary Australian jazz composers¹: Andrea Keller (VIC), Tony Gould (VIC), Stephen Magnusson (VIC), Matt Keegan (NSW) and Lyndon Gray (SA) - to each create a new work for a string quartet using chiaroscuro as their inspiration. The artists were given free reign over their response and encouraged to experiment with improvised, semi-improvised and fully scored music.

"Since we formed in 1999, Zephyr Quartet has built a reputation for creating performance experiences that challenge tradition," says Zephyr's founder and cellist, Hilary Kleinig. "We're always looking to work with artists and musicians who share our interest in stepping outside the boundaries of genre and allowing other influences to inform their work. What was really special about the music created for Between Light is that each score comprised an improvisation component, which means we'll never perform - and audiences will never hear - any piece, quite the same way twice. Likewise, the lighting is stimulated, manipulated and generated live - manually and through technology that turns sound waves to light - so this aspect too will be unique to each performance," says Kleinig.

Earlier this year, Zephyr Quartet presented a sell-out world premiere season of their large scale composition, Exquisite Corpse at the Adelaide Festival of Arts and, in 2015, took home both the Ruby and The Adelaide Critic Circle's Independent Arts Foundation Innovation Awards for their 2014 project, Music for Strings and iThings.



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