Musical Friends

Can music describe a person?

Flinders Quartet explores this with new pieces by Eötvös, Singh, and Nicolas, and Borodin’s second quartet.

Mendelssohn famously said, ‘It’s not that music is too imprecise for words, but too precise…’. Flinders Quartet has always loved this quote and decided to explore this idea by pairing two composers, Melody Eötvös and Rishin Singh, living on opposite sides of the world in a musical letter writing project. The premise being that one composer begins the conversation by writing a short section, which is sent to the other composer who absorbs the music and writes a short section in return. Flinders Quartet are, in effect, the go-between.

Natalie Nicolas’ By the Tide of the Moon captures the strength and beauty of Aida Tuciute, a Lithuanian Olympic swimmer with a love of ocean swimming; while Borodin’s second quartet depicts the love of his wife and their first three glorious months of marriage spent in Heidelberg. The themes of love, letter writing, and communication through music are counterbalanced with the crystalline brilliance of Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue in C minor, which celebrates the sheer joy of music for music’s sake alone.