In this Strad video premiere, watch the Solem Quartet perform Kate Bush’s And Dream of Sheep, arranged by the quartet’s second violinist William Newell.

Newell tells The Strad, ’Kate Bush was a significant part of my musical upbringing; as much as I grew up playing classical music, I grew up listening to pop and my dad loved Kate Bush, playing her music religiously in the car and at home’

Choosing this song, which represents heartbreaking emotion and an idiosyncratic other-worldliness, Newell continues, ’I tried to bring out this fragile and often strange world with the use of harmonics and glissandi. In Bush’s original song, the voice is lost, drifting at sea and drifting into sleep while fighting to stay awake.’ 

The video was shot in ’a dark and dingy disused basement’ by videographer Richard Herring, with lighting trickery to create the atmosphere of darkness and nighttime, with shimmers of distant lights.

And Dream of Sheep appears on the Solem Quartet’s new album The Four Quarters, out now.

Read: Keeping it fresh and mixing it up - Solem Quartet on combining old and new works

Watch: Solem Quartet performs Bill Withers’ Lovely Day from lockdown

Read: Sentimental Work: Matt Haimovitz

 

Topics