SHADOWINGS/ Lontano: George Benjamin, Silvina Milstein, Rob Keeley & Ed Nesbit

The ensemble Lontano will premiere Silvina Milstein’s Shan Shui (mountain/water) for nine instruments alongside Rob Keeley’s String Trio and the programme will also feature George Benjamin’s Three Miniatures for Solo Violin (Caroline Balding), Ed Nesbit’s Night and Silence for piano, Two- Piccolo Duets by Rob Keeley, and Silvina Milstein’s Piano Phantasy after Mozart K. 475 (Dominic Saunders).
‘The Western mind appears to work in straight lines; the Oriental, in wonderful curves and circles’ wrote Lafcadio Hearn, late nineteenth-century writer of Greek and Irish descent, strongly anchored in American literature, and fascinated by French and Eastern cultures, who married a samurai’s daughter, took Japanese citizenship, and became a Buddhist practitioner. Paradoxically in the 1960s, Lafcadio Hearn’s retelling of several Japanese ghost-stories became the source of Masaki Koyabashi’s film Kwaidan, featuring a sound-track by Toru Takemitsu, whose music brings together traditional Japanese and contemporary European art music.

Treading in the footsteps of these intercultural encounters, diachronic ‘shadowings’, and transpositions between art forms, Silvina Milstein’s Shan Shui plays around with notions of time and imagery from films by Kenji Mizoguchi and Kaneto Shindo.