Fragment from an Unfinished String Quartet

Commissioned by the Brentano String Quartet for their Fragments Project in celebration of their 20th Anniversary Season. The work reflects on the first movement of an unfinished quartet by Shostakovich.

for String Quartet. Par ORFF CARL. Like the Quartettsatz of 1914 (ED 7816), Quartettsatz in c-Moll of 1921, premièred by the Henschel Quartet at the Orff Centre in Munich in 2007, testifies to Orff’s early struggles towards the classical-Romantic tradition. Originally left unfinished as a fragment in C sharp minor, the first version has now been reconstructed (in C minor) from a source that only survived as a copy with autograph corrections. It is interesting to see a new tonal language appearing quite suddenly (and notated without bar lines in the first version) in the coda./ Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes