Coffee by the Plague Pit (Peter Sheppard Skærved, violin) by Composer David Riebe

Live recording courtesy of Colin Still, Optic Nerve.

Grammy nominated British violinist Peter Sheppard Skærved premiering the solo violin composition “Coffee by the Plague Pit”, based on the painting “Plague Pit No More: Conversation and Coffee in the Sunshine” by Sheppard Skærved himself (see picture). The painting shows a few people at Charterhouse Square in London, a place which was the site of the largest plague pit in the city during the Black Death with tens of thousands of people buried there.

Sheppard Skærved writes about the painting: ”On a summer day last year, my wife and I sat with a cup of coffee in Charterhouse Square, watching people enjoying the sunshine and talking about the large burial pit discovered there.”

The piece tries to capture the absurd contradiction between today’s peaceful square and the horrors of the plague in the 14th century. In the effort to understand the contrasts, the music asks questions about time and space, binding together an everyday conversation over a cup of coffee with the medieval mass grave below.

The performance took place at the chapel of The Charterhouse, just next to the square, in September 2019.