An die Musik: String Quartet: Score and Parts

Simon Holt's 3rd Quartet is the third of six pieces which make up a cycle with the overall title 'Terrain'. Lasting around 23 minutes this wonderful work is arranged for String Quartet and wasco-commissioned by The Radcliffe Trust NMC Recordings Internationales Musikfestival Heidelberger Fruhling and Wigmore Hall. The premiere was performed on 19th January 2015. The six different compositions ofwhich 3rd Quartet is the third are for different combinations of stringed instruments featuring Piano in the second piece. The music that comprises 3rd Quartet is drawn from theother parts of the cycle as a whole yet in a reverse order. In this way the piece develops what has come before foreshadows what's to come all the while encompassing the entire cycle in a single piece.

String Quartet No.4 was composed by Hans Abrahamsen in 2012. Commissioned by Westdeutscher Rundfunk and Wigmore Hall For the Arditti Quartet. Programme note: The basic idea for my Fourth String Quartet was very clear to me: It should be quiet and soft music or to put it in a german term: 'hoch im Himmel gesungen ...' (”High singing in heaven…”). Each of the four movements has a different scordatura/pitch. The first movement begins – like my work ”Schnee” – sky-high with an airy and soft melody by the first violin. The second movement is fast and ”movement andjoy”-like. It consists of two duets and a reverse style counterpoint. While the sections were progressively longer in the first movement they are getting shorter and shorter in the second. ”Dark heavy and earthy” is the third movement and its pizzicato recalls big black raindrops falling to the ground. It is the dark and grainy counterpart to the first movement whereas the fourth movement corresponds to the second. The fourth movement was planned as a dark and heavy counterpart but it turned out to be like ”babbling” music of a child. My Fourth String Quartet has become in its way a serene and cool piece. So the Quartet has been finished luckyly after twenty years – it was already in 1990 that I was commissioned by Wittener Tage für Neue Musik to write the piece for Arditti Quartet. Hans Abrahamsen

Vagn Holmboe's String Quartet No. 1 ('1.Quartetto') /Strygekvartet Nr. 1 Op. 46 (1949). I. Affettuoso - animato II. Adagio - andante - presto - andante - adagio III. Introduzione Lento un poco-molto vivace Strygekvartetten opus 46 er den første af den række strygekvartetter - nu tyve (1986) - som Vagn Holmboe har beriget musiklivet med. Den blev uropført kort efter sin fremkomst i 1949 af Erling Bloch-kvartetten som senere fremførste den ved en I.S.C.M. festival i Frankfurt hvor dens succes medvirkede til komponistens internationale gennembrud (...). ALC.