SKU: HL.14031851

ISBN 9788759880661. Danish.

Holmboe's last quartet work, which is unoffi­cially also String Quartet No. 21, was the last work he ever composed, and was unfinished on his death in 1996. His pupil Per Nørgård has finished the quartet, and himself characterizes his contribution by saying that the score existed “in an only partly completed form, which could however be written out with only a few cases of doubt”. With only two movements and a play­ing time of about nine minutes it is at its exist­ing length the shortest of Holmboe's string quar­tets. The first movement takes the form of one long arch in a rocking triple time which constantly shiftsamong different tempo and pulse sensations. At the same time the rhythmic en­ergy increases until the movement, in a faster Con moto tempo accelerates to a more flowing 12/8 time, coloured both rhythmically by cross-­rhythms in duple time and timbrally by harmon­ics in the viola. In its middle section, Con fuoco, the movement culminates in both tempo and expression until it falls calm in brief recapitula­tions in reverse order of the first two sections. The rocking feeling continues in the second movement, but now at a more extroverted level from the outset, Allegro and pizzicato. The en­ergy builds up further as the mood intensifies to Con fuoco, while all instruments go over to bowed playing, but like the first movement, this movement ends Adagio here however not as a gradual attenuation but through a sudden shift in tempo to a calm, imitative passage before the movement slowly thins out to the almost inaudible through a last, dense, open sounding chord with a brief violin solo above it.

The quartet is dedicated to Holmboe's wife MeLa May Holmboe, and was given its first performance by the Kontra Quartet on 22nd March 1997 at the Carl Nielsen Academy of Music in Odense, Denmark.

SKU: HL.14042989

ISBN 9788759829240. English.

All In One for 3 String Quartets was composed by Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen in 2013 (String Quartet No.12,13 and 14 played simultaneously).


Gudmundsen-Holmgreen has written a collection of three new string quartets: String Quartet no. 12, ‘Each in Each’; String Quartet no. 13, ‘Mutual Ordering’, and String Quartet no. 14, ‘Well-Tuned Sounds’. Each quartet can be played on its own; they can also played simultaneously in any combination. When all three quartets are played together, as they are tonight, the combined work is titled All in One. About this collection, Gudmundsen-Holmgreenwrites:


'Some years ago Kronos and the vocal group Theatre of Voices performed three new pieces, which I had written for the two groups: one for Theatre of Voices (Green), and two for Kronos (New Ground and No Ground). They were played and sung by each group independently – but also both groups together concurrently, on top of each other, as a final gesture. The combined pieces were called New Ground Green and No Ground Green.


'David liked the idea (and the result) of pairs of quartets that could be played both independently and simultaneously, and asked me if the vocal quartet could be transformed into a string quartet. It could not. He then asked me to repeat the whole set-up with a new pair of quartets, adding also some percussion instruments, as was the case with Green for Theatre of Voices. Of course this was tempting. Furthermore David asked me to make one of the two new quartets a little easier to play.
'I began to work. The Kronos part of the pair of quartets turned out to be tough to play, as David puts it. Unfortunately the ‘easier’ one was tough to play also! So I had to write one more, which was then a little easier still (but still not easy).
'The three new works can be played separately and on top of each other in many different combinations, resulting in different kinds of.

SKU: HL.49045775

ISBN 9783702471132. UPC: 803452068235. 7.0x10.0x0.436 inches.

Kurt Weill developed his creative energies mainly within the world of musical theater, where he proved to be an immensely productiveand imaginative innovator, but he also left behind a small body of work for the concert hall. The Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra op. 12 dates from the spring of 1924. Scored for two flutes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, one oboe and trumpet, percussion and four contrabasses, the concerto comprises three movements. While composing the work, Weill informed his publisher: 'I am workingon a concerto for violin and wind orchestra that I hope to finish within two or three weeks. The work is inspired by the idea - one never carried out before - of juxtaposing a single violin with a chorus of winds.' The specific character of Weill's concerto as music written for chamber orchestra (with an often soloistic treatment of instruments) leads to a transparency that requires utmost precision in the ensemble playing. In the quest for an overall sonic balance, the coarser-sounding wind instruments need to explore all dynamic nuances. The solo part is challenging not only from a technical standpoint but also from an acoustic one (it is crucial to make the violin 'sound'). In spite of these challenges - or precisely because of them - critics in the 1920s called the solo parthighly idiomatic and extremely rewarding. Since then the concerto has become a 'modern classic' in concert halls around the world. (Elmar Juchem, August 2010). The score is based on the critical text of the Kurt Weill Edition Ser. II, Vol. 2.