THE DEVIL YOU KNOW - A Candlelit Concert in the Cemtery with the Brompton Quartet Saturday and Sunday the 3oth & 31st October 2021 at 7:00 pm ARRIVAL INFORMATION FOR THE DEVIL YOU KNOW - As the Cemetery will be closed to the general public from 5 pm, the only entrance that will be open for the performance is the one on Old Brompton Road. This entrance will be open from 6:45 pm and the performance will start at 7:10 pm. NO LATECOMERS WILL BE ADMITTED. Enter the cemetery at sundown and proceed at your peril to this candlelit concert amidst the headstones of Brompton Cemetery. Camille Saint-Saëns (1835 - 1921), Danse Macabre The Danse Macabre (or the Dance of Death) was a medieval masque in which Death invites people from all stations of life, from pope to pauper, to dance with him in an infernal conga line to the grave, symbolising the futility of all earthly vanities. Camille Saint-Saëns’s tone poem evokes the legend of how at midnight on Halloween each year Death appears and summons the dead from their graves to dance as he plays his violin. Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75), String Quartet No 7 in F sharp minor F sharp minor is a key traditionally associated with pain and suffering. Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his 7th string quartet in 1960, dedicating it to the memory of his late wife Nina in celebration of what would have been her 50th birthday. The quartet reflects their marriage, its three movements (played without a break) have contradictory moods: the first agitated, harsh and nervous; the second haunting, minimalist and ethereal; the third frenetic, paranoid and combative, subsiding into an eerie waltz before it ends on an unexpected harmonic resolution. Sergei Prokofiev (1891 - 1953), String Quartet No 1 in B minor Sergei Prokofiev wrote his first string quartet in 1931 on trains during a concert tour that crisscrossed the USA. He was at an equivalent crossroads in his life. Since 1917 he’d been living in the West, where he was branded an “apostle of Bolshevism” and a “tool of Soviet propaganda.” He was desperately homesick for a return to Russia, where he was styled an “enemy of Soviet culture” and his latest ballet had been panned as a “counter revolutionary composition bordering on Fascism”. In the end he decided to go back to Stalinist Russia. Better the Devil you know.. Tickets £20 including a delightful Victorian punch and a 20% donation toward a host of restoration projects at Brompton Cemetery. Please click here to purchase. Image Credit - Skeletons playing music in the cemetery. Public domain, courtesy of the Wellcome Collection | /td> |
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