The Sacconi Quartet performs Jonathan Dove’s first string quartet Out of Time (2001), in a project that took place after the UK’s first pandemic lockdown in September 2020.
This performance was captured five years ago by filmmaker Joe Morgan in the Folkestone Leas Pavilion, a derelict 1902 theatre that sits atop the cliffs of the seaside town in Kent, England.
The film was initially released on Amazon Prime and now, after five years since the project, the quartet has re-mastered the film in 4K, with general release on its YouTube channel on Friday 26 September.
The work comprises six movements: I. Quite fast - II. Slow - III. Stomping - IV. Lively - V. Fast - VI. Gently moving. Written in 2001, it was commissioned for the Vanbrugh Quartet by the Summer Music Society of Dorset and Mrs Elizabeth Allsebrook, in memory of her husband, Peter Allsebrook.
Dove describes the work as ‘a serenade for someone I never met.’
’Mrs Elizabeth Allsebrook asked me to commemorate her husband in a string quartet, and told me a great deal about him. Out of Time is not his musical portrait, but it was suggested by his irresistible, infectious energy, and by his departure.
’The quartet is in six short movements: a driving moto perpetuo; a kind of nocturne in which the gentle pulsings are slightly out of time with each other, like sleepers in the same room; a stubborn dance (’Stomping’); and then three movements that run together: an innocuous ‘folk-song’ emerges out of movement, provokes a hurried attempt to escape, then allows itself quietly to be led away.
Allsebrook lived to hear the first performance of Out of Time but has since died.
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