The song is his first music in almost a year since the 2022 sophomore album “Superache”. American singer-songwriter Conan Gray returned with a new song “Never Ending Song” alongside a music video on May 19, 2023.Conan Gray Returns With New Song “Never Ending Song”.Ensemble 360 played it as though there were no doubts about its merits, and though at times it felt like an orchestral work shorn of its brass and woodwind parts, its bardic qualities were compellingly evoked.Donate to support families affected by the crisis in Ukraine ➔ The keystone of this five movement work (Sibelius exploiting the “arch” structure before Bartók, it seems) is the slow third movement, a deeply introspective quest for serenity – and the point at which Sibelius wrote “voces intimae” over a copy of the score.
We are immersed in dialogue from the very start, in the conversation of first violin and cello, and the demonstration of the work’s subtitle, Voces Intimae (Intimate Voices), is readily apparent, though what these voices are saying remains enigmatic to the end. He clearly loved it (“The kind of thing that brings a smile to your lips at the hour of death,” he wrote to his wife), though it is rarely programmed these days. Sibelius’ one mature String Quartet in D minor took up most of the first half of the programme, another work haunted by its composer’s mortality, written at a time when Sibelius was undergoing treatment for throat cancer. The standing ovation at the end of Ensemble 360’s performance showed how wrong he was. One wonders how he could have been so deaf to its astonishing qualities. “Nothing here at all: leave well alone and stick to writing songs,” declared Ignaz Schuppanzich (whose musicians premiered many of Beethoven’s quartets) after a private play-through. Cerovsek pushed the tempi along in the final two movements, providing no respite save for the third movement’s major key Trio section. The atmospheric setting suited its haunted energy, particularly in the funereal tread of the slow movement’s variations on the Lied that inspired it.
It’s a work of relentless drive, bleakness of vision and intense foreboding, unsurprisingly given that it was written in the aftermath of Schubert’s diagnosis with the syphilis which would kill him.
The main work, Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” quartet, was performed as dusk fell and the church was illuminated only by lights on the performers’ music stands.
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