Quatuor Voce

Itinéraire

Voce Quartet

Cécile Roubin, violin [Violin 1, Pieces 7-10]

Sarah Dayan, violin [Violin 1, Pieces 1-3, 5-6, 12]

Guillaume Becker, viola

Lydia Shelley, cello

Vincent Segal, artistic director

Vincent Peirani, accordion [Section 11]

Kevin Seddiki, zarb [Pieces 5-6]

Kinan Azmeh, clarinet [Section 4]

After many years of performing, and with a whole range of experiences nurtured by many different new encounters, we have conceived Itinéraire as a journey with sixteen strings, freely inspired by the trailblazing example of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. At the dawn of the 20th century these two young musicians, their remarkable futures still lying ahead, toured the villages of central Europe, gathering, transcribing and recording hundreds of melodies and folk songs. This ethnomusicological work gave birth to uniquely coloured new masterpieces, and we want to add our own contribution to the treasury of the string quartet repertoire by exploring afresh the possibilities of interaction between music of the oral tradition and the art of the string quartet. And so we have chosen five superb artists from a range of diverse backgrounds – Kinan Azmeh, Vincent Peirani, Kevin Seddiki, Vincent Segal and Gabriel Sivak – giving each one a commission inspired by musical worlds with which they have a close relationship.

In view of the novelty of the ideas involved, we have enlisted the acute hearing and expertise of Vincent Segal, a unique practitioner of the cello, who has accompanied us in our instrumental and musical research. In the course of this Itinéraire, there will be a halt at ‘Escalay’ (‘The Water Wheel’) – by Hamza El Din – with a brief nod in the direction of our illustrious elder brethren, the Kronos Quartet.