United Strings of Europe: Orchestral adventurers
Susan Nickalls
Thursday, October 27, 2022
United Strings of Europe has been a globally-minded enterprise since its inception at the Royal Academy of Music. Susan Nickalls profiles an ensemble that bridges cultural divides and casts fresh light on music from Gesualdo to Stravinsky
This article was originally published in our Summer 2022 issue. Click here to subscribe to our quarterly print magazine and be the first to read our upcoming issue features.
Music colleges are fertile ground for the formation of ensembles. These often continue after graduation as musicians embark on their professional careers. This is exactly how the violinist Julian Azkoul came to create the United Strings of Europe (USE) with his musical peers. Growing up in Geneva and Switzerland, he says he got the music bug from his father, a classical guitarist from Lebanon. Azkoul studied in Wisconsin and Cambridge before going on to the Royal Academy of Music.
‘While I was doing my masters at the Royal Academy from 2011 to 2013, I realised that I wanted to play largerscale chamber music for string orchestra and that I was among musicians from many different European nationalities and beyond. The United Strings of Europe grew out of those bonds of friendship, but the name is not political. It’s more a recognition and celebration of our shared cultural heritage.’
The name is also a neat acronym for an ensemble which has a number of purposes. Since its first project in 2013, USE has flourished on the back of Azkoul’s inspired programming and arrangements of existing music for string orchestra. The pool of 16–18 regular instrumentalists have a busy concert and recording schedule with a strong focus on commissioning and performing new music.
USE’s forthcoming premiere Apollo Resurrected at London’s Kings Place (28 October) followed by a performance at the Leeds International Concert Season (17 November) is a good example of Azkoul’s imaginative programming. Taking Stravinsky’s ballet Apollo as a starting point, he has substituted the four dancers for jugglers and invited the theatrical director Bill Barclay to write a new libretto.
The USE performs at London’s Conway Hall
‘In this re-staging, Apollo is not a god necessarily but an artist down on his luck. He’s endured Covid and lockdown and needs to find his love for art and life again. Juggling is a strong metaphor for renewal, productivity and recovery. The work begins with the cosmic-like music of Pēteris Vasks’s Viatore (Traveller) to introduce the concept of someone lost or travelling who needs to find his way. Then to end the show, British composer Joanna Marsh has written a response piece to complement the work which also involves jugglers. Stravinsky’s Apollo ends with the god’s apotheosis and this expansion will symbolise a harmonious reconnection between artist and practice.’
Before that, the ensemble made a long overdue visit to Geneva on 10 June; its concert there was cancelled three times because of the pandemic. The programme for this appearance, ‘Tributes and Farewells’, included Vasks’s Viatore, Osvaldo Golijov’s Last Round and Azkoul’s arrangements of Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in F Minor Op. 80 and Caroline Shaw’s and the swallow. Written as a response to the refugees fleeing the war in Syria, Shaw’s piece is a setting from Psalm 84: ‘The sparrow found a house and the swallow her nest, where she may place her young.’
The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer continues her exploration of the theme of migration in To the Hands for strings and choir which USE will premiere in the UK with the Sansara Choir at St Martin-in-the-Fields in London on 25 November, says Azkoul. ‘This piece is also inspired by the Syrian civil war, but we don’t want to do it in a way that comes across as prosperous westerners performing music about refugees. We want to get refugees involved with their responses to the themes and movements of the work.’
Shaw’s compositions also feature on USE’s latest album, Renewal, with soprano Ruby Hughes, which came out in January. It’s the second in a series of recordings for the Scandinavian label BIS Records. Azkoul says they were lucky to sign with the label early on in the pandemic. ‘We’d just recorded our first album In Motion two weeks before lockdown. So it was a real shot in the arm as it gave us something to keep working on amidst all the cancellations. In April 2020 we pitched it to five labels and three of them wanted to release it. But we decided to go with BIS who signed us for five albums, one a year.’
Other projects in the pipeline include Inner Voices with soprano Héloïse Werner in 2023 and the fourth album, with a working title of Metamorphosis, featuring USE’s world premiere recording of Daniel Kidane’s Be Still for strings and crotales (small, tuned cymbals). Also included will be arrangements of madrigals by Gesualdo and Maddalena Casulana, the late Renaissance Italian lutenist, singer and the first known female composer in the history of western music to have a book of her works published.
‘I like to draw links between seemingly disparate works to recontextualise things and make the music more interesting for the listener. There is incredible contrapuntal writing in Strauss’s Metamorphosen, which is also on the album, and I wanted to juxtapose this with the counterpoint and mixed polyphony of the earlier madrigals’, says Azkoul.
USE is also experiencing a busy summer with several performances as an artistic partner of the recently launched grassroots Festival of Europe. This includes an outreach concert associated with the ensemble’s performances at Wilton’s Music Hall that took place in May. In collaboration with Together Productions, USE have been running composition workshops for refugees and asylum seekers in Essex and performed these new pieces, with the participants, in Union Chapel (26 June). Essex is one of the most deprived areas in south east England and with Tilbury Docks the final destination of the Windrush ship, it is symbolic as the place where people from the Caribbean disembarked, says Azkoul. ‘Touching on themes like these, which are relevant to different groups of people, is part of what we do alongside our artistic output. It’s a place for us where the music and the community elements can intersect.’
Delivering innovative outreach programmes which bridge cultural divides is a strand of the ensemble’s work which Azkoul says came about in an organic way in 2014 when the USE started touring France and Switzerland.
‘We found it was a refreshing way of communicating with people and were often taken aback by the reaction from the participants in our workshops, some of whom had no prior knowledge of classical music. In particular we were struck by how children could get to the heart of a message or a sentiment in a work. As musicians, we’re often too
intellectualised by all our training or we’re so busy doing things that we can overlook some of the essence and meaning.’
Although there is definitely an appetite for this type of work, Azkoul says part of the challenge of taking it to people who have different lives, preoccupations and priorities is not taking it for granted that they want to talk about music. He gives an example, before the pandemic, when the ensemble was regularly invited to perform in Lebanon. As an adjunct they started working with refugees and disadvantaged young people in the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp outside Beirut.
‘On one occasion we were working with kids who were not really interested or engaged in what we wanted to talk about and demonstrate; things like how cooperation and respect were key to an ensemble working well. So we turned it around and showed them what it would be like if we disdained one another and that immediately changed the mood in the room. They started to understand why we were there and what we wanted to share with them. So from that point on we got them on side.’
Like many ensembles, USE receives no core funding and relies on various trusts, private sponsors, and, now concerts have resumed, ticket sales to fund their activities on a project-by-project basis. Azkoul is in the process of turning USE into a charity so that the group can apply to trusts who give to those with charitable status. He also has his own freelance career as a violinist and admits that keeping track of everything can be something of a struggle.
‘I’ve often asked myself if I should freelance less and focus more on building up USE as an organisation. But now that the group is getting busier after lockdown, it means I will have less time for touring with other groups. The main thrust of USE is to share our approach to music-making and to build cultural bridges, collaborating with artists and organisations on a range of projects which can be really inspiring. We seek to harness our skills to present meaningful work and to hopefully really make a difference.
USE’s upcoming performance, Apollo Resurrected, will take place at London’s Kings Place on Friday (28 October). Tickets can be found here.