The Solem Quartet

As I have mentioned before, I am a fan of Steve Reich's piece 'Different Trains'. My last effort to see it live - at the Royal Northern College of Music - was frustrated by a bout of covid but a few weeks ago I saw there was a performance planned at White Hotel.

Now, White Hotel, a former garage in an industrial area near Strangeways, has a bit of a reputation that it is struggling to shake off but I am growing to love it as a venue. It seemed like a great place to see 'Different Trains'.

The performance was by the Solem Quartet, whom I'd not heard of before, and was being put on by Through The Noise, an organisation that kind of crowdfunds gigs and tours. So, you buy your ticket and if enough are sold, the gig goes ahead (or you get your money back if it doesn't). 

On this occasion, it appears that enough tickets were sold, so I went along with Yoss, this evening. The performance was excellent including a brief introduction to the history of the piece, which Yoss said was absent when he saw the piece performed at RNCM. 

I found that quite shocking, actually, as I think the context of the piece is important: Reich conceived it thinking back to travelling on the train in America during the war, contrasting his journeys with a very different kind of train that had been running in Nazi Germany, carrying Jewish people to the camps. 

The second part of the show was a set of Kate Bush covers, arranged by the quartet, with a woman called Alice Zawadzki delivering the vocals. I was expecting this to be awful and was fully prepared to bail after a couple of songs. 

In the end, though, it was brilliant. Ms Zawadzki pulled off the difficult trick of performing Kate Bush's vocals without doing some kind of pastiche. 

High points for me included 'The Hounds Of Love' and 'And Dream Of Sheep', the latter of which was performed as an instrumental.