String Quartet No. 4. Par BARRY GERALD. The title of Barry’s fourth string quartet refers to a Kafka story of the same name about a trapeze artist who is happy only when aloft. This is striking music, full of fragility, beauty, outbursts and to finish, an unexpected hymn sung by the quartet./ Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes

Born in South Africa but now an Irish citizen Kevin Volans? musical idiom has been shaped by an unusually diverse range of experiences including studies with Stockhausen in Cologne field trips to South Africa tostudy traditional music his own involvement with the New Simplicity movement his collection of contemporary art and African textiles friendships with composers like Morton Feldman and Gerald Barry as well as a love of virtuosopiano music which he performs broadcasts and records. While having an easily recognised unique voice Volans? music resists compartmentalisation. He is as comfortable working in conventional genres as embarking oninnovative collaborations with artists of other disciplines. String Quartet No.1 (White Man Sleeps) was written for the Kronos Quartet and was first performed by them in July 1986 London.The title?White Man Sleeps? comes from a moment in nyanga Panpipe music where the performers leave off playing their loud pipes for a few cycles and dance only to the sound of their ankle rattles to let the whitelandowner sleep for a minute or two.'In composing this piece I drew from the following sources: the first movement owes something to the style of Basotho concertina music; the second and fourth movements are drawnfrom traditional Nyungwe music played by Makina Chirenje and his Nyanga panpipe group at Nsava Tete Mozambique recorded and transcribed by Andrew Tracey (to be found in an article entitled ?The nyanga Panpipe dance? in AfricanMusic Vol.5 No.1 (1971); the third movement derives from the San bow music (recorded by Tony Traill of the University of Witwatersrand) and from Basotho lesiba music transcribed by myself; in the fifth movement I added my owninvented folklore. My approach to the original music was anything but purist it is played in Western tuning filtered slowed down by a few ?time-octaves? cast into non-African metres (like the 13-beat pattern of the first

Some of Beethoven?s most enduring and unabashedly successful works stem from his so-called ?Middle Period? and in the genre of chamber music the Quartets Op.74 And 95 together with the Op.59 quartets (BA9017) complete this period.Jonathan Del Mar?s scholarly critical edition of Quartets Op.74 And 95 sets the record straight once and for all restoring Beethoven?s articulation dynamics and lengths of slurs as the composer originally intended.The interdependency of the sources and their readings are clearly laid out by Del Mar in his Critical Commentary which also contains facsimile pagespointing out ambiguities with previous editions.- Bärenreiter quality Urtext.- Critical Commentary (Eng) with facsimiles.- Study score (TP918) includes historical introduction (Ger/Eng) by Barry Cooper.

Original version commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Arts · Revised version commissioned in 2015 by Raidió Teilifís Eireann and the Wigmore Hall, with the support of André Hoffmann, president of the Fondation Hoffmann, a Swiss grant-making foundation / Quatuor A Cordes