As part of this year’s Spitalfields Festival, a performance by the Sacconi Quartet is offering an extra dimension to the listening experience. Their concert on 10 June allows you to hold in your hands this amazingly tactile object (below), crafted out of wood, viscera, valves and palpitating flesh by the production company Rusty Squid. There are 100 of them, each containing a fragment of the heart of all four of the Sacconi’s musicians.
OK, I’ve made up the viscera and flesh bit, but - if you can get to the London, Lichfield or Bristol Proms performances – the sensation you will surely have is not far off that gruesome David Cronenberg-esque vision.
Thanks to the electronics and a tiny pumping valve within this box (an exotic blend of three- and four-sided geometries, a shape appropriately called a “chestahedron”), and via Wi-Fi connections to the heart monitors that the players will wear, you can actually feel the heartbeat of the individual player as an uncanny, living presence in your hand for the duration of their performance of Beethoven’s Op 132 string quartet.
The boxes shake, tremulate, and audibly beat; together they make a sound like a gentler version of Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes (even if – hopefully – none of the hearts stops beating, as Ligeti’s metronomes do). It’s an appropriate choice of piece for this project, given Op 132’s deep connection with physical health: the third movement was composed during 1825 as Beethoven’s “Holy song of thanksgiving of a convalescent to the Deity, in the Lydian mode” after he recovered from a bout of serious illness.
The question is whether this heart-exposing experiment will do what the quartet hope - namely get the audience closer to the physicality of their performance in a way that will reveal new musical dimensions, or rather, give an insight into the players’ individual and collective stress levels and performance anxieties around the challenges of performing Beethoven.
The Sacconis are amplifying the dimensions of their performance in other ways, too, with an interactive lighting rig, also connected to their heartbeats. Beethoven inscribed a copy of his Missa Solemnis with the words: “From the Heart - may it return to the Heart!” He may not have expected that to be taken as literally as the Sacconis do in Heartfelt. Whatever the combined aesthetic and physical effect of the performance, the quartet are putting their hearts on the line as no other quartet has ever done before.
- Heartfelt is at Spitalfields festival tonight, Lichfield festival on 10 July and the Bristol Proms on 30 July. Details: sacconi.com
