Event

Four Quartets: Variations

Four poets, four actors, four trombones, and four percussionists breathe life into and around T.S. Eliot's inimitable text, with vocal recitation, variation, improvisation, and instrumental music.

"Four Quartets: Variations," revolving around T. S. Eliot's inimitable sequence Four Quartets, is a theatrical, musical and poetic tour de force. Moored by the performances of four vocalizing actors and four poets interacting with excerpted and remixed text of Eliot's Four Quartets, the project also features byways into performance sets by Iktus (percussion quartet) and The Guidonian Hand (trombone quartet) which expand the musical reaches and correspondences of the poem. Emphasizing the profundity and structural revelations of Eliot's book-length text, the actors and musicians surround the poets' recitations with extended techniques of all varieties, from improbable instrumental sounds to extremes of vocal and improvisatory production, letting the text re-echo in time past, time present, and time future. Fare forward, voyagers.

The quartet of actors are Marya Lowry, Phil Timberlake, Corianna Moffatt, and Nate Speare, while participating poets include Cathy Park Hong, Katie Ford, Jon Woodward, and Oni Buchanan.

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About Ariel Artists:

Ariel Artists is an artist management company designed and staffed by classical musicians. Founded in Boston in 2009, our mission is to connect three groups of people: a roster of the highest-caliber concert artists chosen for their original performance visions, concert presenters who value truly fascinating, world-class performers and who showcase incredible performance projects, and audiences who long and deserve to hear and experience the kind of mastery, achievement, and vision that these artists live and breathe. Like Shakespeare's Ariel, the artists on the Ariel Artists roster have the "spirits to enforce" and the "art to enchant."