Oerknal presents a concert featuring intriguing and often unexplored repertoire for violin and percussion, based around selections from Linda Catlin Smith’s massive duo Dirt Road. Smith’s music is meditative and elegant, characterized by a depth of fragility of expression that is both engaging and affecting. Dirt Road is no exception; an hour-long collection of short pieces for violin and percussion, the music has a gentle, hypnotic quality – time itself seems to vanish into the background.

Music by composers Aida Shirazi and Ashkan Behzadi serve as a counterpoint to Dirt Road. Aida’s One Day, The Bird Will Be Free… is a scintillating work for solo violin, gentle and introspective. Ashkan’s Morfismo plastico is a virtuoso duet full of dynamic gestures and hard-edged sounds – the combination of marimba and violin pizzicato creates a graph of musical points, onto which a form of extreme plasticity is glossed.