Unfinished Quartet

SKU: HL.49009837

ISBN 9790200203004. 5.25x7.5x0.037 inches.

With more than 1,200 titles from the orchestral and choral repertoire, from chamber music and musical theatre, Edition Eulenburg is the world's largest series of scores, covering large part of music history from the Baroque to the Classical era and looking back on a long tradition.

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: FG.55011-674-0

ISBN 9790550116740.

Scored for piano left hand and string quartet, Kalevi Aho's Mysterium (2019) consists of four movements performed without a break. Aho had earlier come across the sketches for what was to be the last, unfinished work, Mysterium, by Alexander Scriabin. These fragmentary sketches inspired him to write this piano quintet dedicated to its commissioner, pianist Izumi Tateno. It is founded throughout on six-part Scriabin-like harmonies that also served as a basis for the melodic material. The first movement (Misterioso) is, as its name suggests, shadowy, mysterious in mood. The dynamic, quick second movement (Vivace) proceeds in quintuple 10/16 and 15/16 rhythms. The third movement (Adagio, misterioso) is again slow and dreamy, before arriving at the finale (Moderato) beginning in 11/16 time. The finale draws all the quintet's musical material together, and the work finally fades on mysterious Scriabin harmonies.