Ligeti Quartet

The Ligeti Quartet play Turner Sims on Tuesday 22 September, starting at 19:30. The night is built around Steve Reich's 90th birthday, and the centrepiece is Different Trains, which the Kronos Quartet commissioned in 1988. It's a piece Reich built from his own childhood train journeys across America, woven together with survivors' testimonies he recorded at Yale's Holocaust archive.

There's a new arrangement on the bill too: Terry Riley's Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band, a cornerstone of the late 60s psychedelic era, rearranged by Richard Jones in 2025. Alongside that, the quartet plays Pauline Oliveros' 70 Chords for Terry (2005) and a selection from John Adams' Book of Alleged Dances (1994). It's a programme that pulls from different corners of the late 20th century, with the Reich birthday as the common thread.

The quartet itself is British and formed in 2010, with Freya Goldmark on first violin, Patrick Dawkins on second, Richard Jones on viola, and Val Welbanks on cello. They've spent the last fifteen years working in modern and contemporary music, and their following reaches well beyond the UK, into Canada, the US, China, Colombia, Germany, Denmark and France.

Tickets are £28 for Band A, £22 for Band B, and £10 for Band C, with Friends' prices of £25.20, £19.80 and £9 respectively. Students and under-18s pay £10 for Bands B and C, and school groups are also £10. The concert is at Turner Sims in the Borough Hall, Southampton, on Tuesday 22 September at 19:30.