Ian Humphries, Rick Koster, violin
Nic Pendlebury, viola
Deirdre Cooper, cello
Now into its third decade, the Smith Quartet remains at the leading edge of the new music world. A champion of the works of the world’s most celebrated composers, commissioning over 200 new pieces with recent works from Michael Nyman, Kevin Volans, Joe Cutler, Donnacha Dennehy, Tunde Jegede, Gabriel Prokofiev and the late Jon Lord.
In 2015 the quartet gave the world premiere of Graham Fitkin’s new work Distil as part of a collaborative project with percussionist Joby Burgess. The work went on to receive the RPS chamber music prize for best chamber composition. The group has not only collaborated with eminent classical musicians such as Burgess, pianist John Tilbury and guitarist David Tanenbaum but also with a diverse array of artists from other disciplines including rock group Pulp, Malian singer Rokia Traoré, jazz musicians John Taylor and Django Bates and dance companies Shobana Jeyasingh, Siobhan Davies and Ultima Vez.
They were featured in the BBC’s The Culture Show in discussion with Steve Reich and in the BAFTA and Emmy award-winning BBC documentary film Holocaust – A Music Memorial Concert from Auschwitzperforming Reich’s Different Trains. Filmed on location, the film marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
The quartet’s touring schedule has taken them around the world appearing in many prestigious festivals including: Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Vancouver Festival, Düsseldorf Festival, Cheltenham and Edinburgh Festivals, La Biennale di Venezia, Jauna Muzika Vilnius, Vale of Glamorgan, the Flanders Festival Brussels and New York’s Bang on a Can Festival, collaborating with Michael Nyman, Philipp Glass, Gavin Bryars, Steve Martland, Howard Skempton.
The quartet has regularly recorded for the BBC and enjoyed an ongoing relationship with Signum Classics. Previous albums on the Signum label include Steve Reich’s Different Trains and the complete Philip Glass quartets.
Other albums of note include Django Bates’ You live and learn… Apparently and Diamond Music by Karl Jenkins on Sony. 2016 saw the the release of the final disc, with pianist John Tilbury, of all the Morton Feldman works for piano and strings, performed and recorded live at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.
In 2015 the quartet, as part of the Kings Place “minimalism unwrapped” series, gave the world premiere of North Shore by Wayne Siegel.
They also collaborated with David Lang in a concert of American minimalist music featuring Arke Luggage, written by Lang for the quartet and soprano Else Torpe.
In the Autumn they concluded their Kings Place cycle with a performance of Michael Nyman’s complete quartets.
The Smith Quartet continued its long established collaboration with Shobana Jeyasingh Dance in 2017 with a UK tour of Material Men redux, a new full length version of the original production that premiered to rave reviews at the QEH. The production had its Italian premiere as part of the 2017 Ravenna Festival.
The Smith Quartet was also invited in Italy by Musica Insieme in Bologna and Milano Musica.
