Through the Walls
A Yiddish string quartet
An alluring work of vernacular modernism
Adam Shatz, US editor of the London Review of Books
Artwork: Sophie Herxheimer
Photogrpahy: Rah Petherbridge
Design: Will Nicholls
Through the Walls incorporates storytelling, ethnographic interviews and field recordings of Anna’s native Stamford Hill,London, to create “a kind of Hasidic musique concrète, hastening our sense of immersion in this environment...There aren’t just sounds in this music, there are people, characters.”
At once inventive and intensely joyful, Lowenstein and the other members of her quartet –
Flora Curzon on violin; Meg Hamilton on viola; Francesca Ter-Berg on cello (Fran&Flora and She’koyokh) – play with verve and gusto as they recreate what Anna calls the ‘sound world’ of her childhood, in which the languages of Beethoven, Bartok, Shostakovich commingled with Yiddish music.
