Last Sunday saw the first concert of the year given by New Music in the South West, an organisation founded a couple of years ago by composer Julian Leeks, based in Bristol. Taking place within the city’s grand Royal West of England Academy of Art, the concert was interconnected with ‘Drawn’, an annual open submission exhibition exploring the diverse facets of drawing (in the midst of which the concert took place), and ‘Four Seasons’, an exhibition of the work of Zhang Enli at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in Bruton. The concert specifically posed the questions, “How does one define the relationship between music and art? How might a work of visual art be re-imagined as music?”. Answers were offered from a collection of composers, all but one of whom have South West associations: Geoff Poole, Julian Leeks, Litha Efthymiou, Jean-Paul Metzger and (the odd one out) Hildur Guðnadóttir. Performed by the Bristol Ensemble String Quartet, the five works were stylistically contrasting and, broadly speaking, offered compelling takes on their respective inspirational origins. Read more