An interview with Sini Simonen

What was your starting point for this project?

It was one of those pandemic projects, where you suddenly have a lot of time and you are just wondering about the world. I got into reading TS Eliot, and we’d played the Adès a lot, which I knew was a reflection on Eliot’s Four Quartets. I was moved by the masterful depiction of his experience of time. We’ve loved Beethoven’s Op. 132 for many years, and I think TS Eliot also loved it. There is this transcendental quality, or something beyond time.

So I guess I was just playing around with ideas when we were suddenly in a completely different reality.

Would this album have been different without the pandemic?

I think this was always on the cards, but there were a few things. We love French music, we love Haydn; it could have been many things. But I think it probably wouldn’t have been this, because I don’t think I would have had so much time to read, think, play around with ideas and just wonder.

Tell us about your decision to arrange the Lassus and Dowland pieces…

I love Renaissance vocal music, so I was thinking what might work for string quartet. I was drawn, of course, to their incredible beauty, but also to the words, because they are about the passage of time. One sort of emerges from the night into the day, and then the other one is kind of depicting the night as a metaphor for death. I’ve never done anything like it before!

Sini Simonen is first violin in the Castalian Quartet