Silence #36: Different trains; Mondriaan Kwartet

On Liberation Day, the Mondriaan Kwartet performed Dmitri Shostakovich's Eighth String Quartet and Different Trains by Steve Reich especially for this edition of Silence. Reich originally wrote the three-movement piece for the Kronos Quartet. The title refers to the period between 1939 and 1942 during which, as a Jewish boy, he regularly traveled back and forth between New York and Los Angeles. Years later, Reich realized: had he lived in Europe during that same period, he would have ridden on other trains and to other destinations. In the composition for string quartet and tape, references to trains and air raids and text phrases sound in sync with musical themes. The Mondriaan Kwartet played Different Trains without a film track, in the emptiness of the grand and also so intimate church space.

About the Mondrian Quartet
The Mondriaan Kwartet, founded in 1982, mainly plays music from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and likes to explore the boundaries between genres and disciplines.