Premiere of a quartet by Matteo Fargion.

Tomorrow, Saturday, the world premiere of the string quartet No. 5, The Nobby Saddy Quartet, by Italian composer Matteo Fargion, will take place at St. Mary-at-Hill Church, Lovat Lane, in the City of London. The sixty-minute work will be performed by the British chamber orchestra Apartment House as part of the Music We’d Like to Hear festival, co-directed by British experimental composers John Lely and Tim Parkinson. Composed in 2020 during confinement, the title of the quartet refers, Fargion explains, to his daughter Francesca’s definition (“nobby saddy”) of his music when she was four years old: “When my daughter Francesca was 4 or 5 she asked me why my music was so ‘nobby saddy’ (or was it ‘knobby saddy’?) I still have no idea what she meant but maybe she was referring to my propensity for the bitter sweet or melancholic! And when I told Jonathan (Burrows, my long standing collaborator) this became a house joke, and I have been banned from writing anything with that flavour ever since! It occurred to me, in this instance, that I could write what I pleased and there was no need to censor anything that came up, including the slightly embarrassing title.
Music We’d Like to Hear is a musical festival without a fixed date for the event, founded in 2005 by Lely and Parkinson, usually consisting of a series of three concerts a year offering a personal selection of pieces of music that each of the curators was interested in hearing, with the intention of sharing their fascination and enthusiasm for this music with a wider audience. The second instalment of 2021 concerts takes place today, Friday 3 September, and tomorrow, at St Mary-at-Hill Church, Lovat Lane, in the City of London. Today’s programme consists of works by Mildred Couper (Xanadu), Charles Ives (Three Quarter-Tone Pieces), Georg Friedrich Haas (Trois Hommages: No.2, Hommage à Josef Matthias Hauer) y Clarence Barlow (Çoğluotobüsişletmesi), performed on piano and electric keyboard by Mark Knoop and Siwan Rhys.

© Photograph by Dorothea Tuch downloaded from Matteo Fargion’s website.