A Form of Exile: On Edward Said and Late Style at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London on Sunday 9th March 2025

Please note: This concert is in the past and has already taken place.

A Form of Exile: On Edward Said and Late Style

Part of the CLS Season 2024-25 Cycle

Add to my Calendar 09-03-2025 18:00 09-03-2025 20:00 36 A Form of Exile: On Edward Said and Late Style This, the second concert collaboration between the City of London Sinfonia and the London Review of Books, presents dazzling works of music and literature created at the end of great careers. Join us to discover the connections between them, as traced by heroic intellectual Edward Said in his own final book. The Palestinian-American postcolonial theorist and political activist best known for his 1978 book Orientalism, who died in 2003, was a regular contributor to the LRB. The last piece he contributed to the paper, ‘Thoughts on Late Style’, became the first chapter of his final book, On Late Style, which was posthumously compiled and published in 2006. The book ranges from Beethoven to Britten, Genet’s Prisoner of Love to Lampedusa’s The Leopard, in positing a theory of late style as a separate, strange and vital aesthetic category. Insofar as its power and influence have endured in a different way to the rest of Said’s work, it is also an embodiment of its own ideas. The CLS and the LRB animate these daring interdisciplinary connections with a programme that takes in the greatest of all late works, Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge – ‘a musicological Holy Grail, a vortex of ideas and implications’ (Alex Ross) – as well as Richard Strauss’ last orchestral piece, and Britten’s String Quartet No.3, which references Death in Venice, his final opera. Readings from texts read by, written by (sometimes addressing the music directly), and written about Said, are interspersed throughout. Together, these musical and literary works tell a story of courageous perseverance, startling originality and lateness as ‘a form of exile’, as Said wrote: a moving account of artistic, human and political truths, which has never been told quite like this before. Queen Elizabeth Hall, London DD/MM/YYYY

Details

Queen Elizabeth Hall
Southbank Centre
Belvedere Rd
South Bank
London
SE1 8XX
England

Sunday 9th March 2025
6:00 PM

Programme

Ludwig van Beethoven – Grosse Fuge, Op.133
Richard Strauss – Horn Concerto no.2, TrV 283
Benjamin Britten – String Quartet no.3 in G major, Op.94
Henry Purcell – Music for the funeral of Queen Mary
Richard Strauss – Duett-Concertino, TrV 293

Performers

Tess Jackson – Conductor
Katherine Spencer – clarinet
Ursula Leveaux – bassoon
Amadea Dazeley-Gaist – Horn

City of London Sinfonia

Other concerts in this Series (+)

Programme Note

This, the second concert collaboration between the City of London Sinfonia and the London Review of Books, presents dazzling works of music and literature created at the end of great careers.

Join us to discover the connections between them, as traced by heroic intellectual Edward Said in his own final book.

The Palestinian-American postcolonial theorist and political activist best known for his 1978 book Orientalism, who died in 2003, was a regular contributor to the LRB.

The last piece he contributed to the paper, ‘Thoughts on Late Style’, became the first chapter of his final book, On Late Style, which was posthumously compiled and published in 2006.

The book ranges from Beethoven to Britten, Genet’s Prisoner of Love to Lampedusa’s The Leopard, in positing a theory of late style as a separate, strange and vital aesthetic category.

Insofar as its power and influence have endured in a different way to the rest of Said’s work, it is also an embodiment of its own ideas.

The CLS and the LRB animate these daring interdisciplinary connections with a programme that takes in the greatest of all late works, Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge – ‘a musicological Holy Grail, a vortex of ideas and implications’ (Alex Ross) – as well as Richard Strauss’ last orchestral piece, and Britten’s String Quartet No.3, which references Death in Venice, his final opera.

Readings from texts read by, written by (sometimes addressing the music directly), and written about Said, are interspersed throughout.

Together, these musical and literary works tell a story of courageous perseverance, startling originality and lateness as ‘a form of exile’, as Said wrote: a moving account of artistic, human and political truths, which has never been told quite like this before.

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