Jouni Kaipainen's String Quartet No. 6 'The Terror Run' Op. 92. Commissioned by the BBC Radio for the Proms concerts 2010. Dedicated to the Meta4 Quartet. Parts available: WH31197A Programme note: My former experience in writing string quartets has made me used to the idea that a piece of mine in this genre lasts close to half an hour and consists of several movements with different characters. This time the commission clearly stated a duration of 12 minutes and this naturally brought about lots of thinking and orientating. Eventually I luckily found out that I actually can alter mybasic “string quartet philosophy” so that such a short piece became an existing option. In the music itself there is nothing very much to explain. The quartet is for the most part quite lively flowing music in fast tempi. In the very beginning there is something haunting in the atmosphere but soon joyful for the most part delicately light at times maybe also “dance-like” characters take over.  But in terms of dramaturgy   the music has a tendency to grow more weighty and harsh and these quasi-violent elements gradually threaten the sunny unproblematic flow. Closer to the end we come to a point where nothing is easy anymore. This brings about a slow section of quite different nature and after that the former hilarious swing tries to make a comeback – but does not really succeed. The run goes on but the overtones are now more shadowy and the mood on the scary side. The subtitle comes from the novel The Camomile Lawn (1984) by Mary Wesley of which Ken Taylor made a wonderful TV series adaptation for Channel 4 (1992) where a marvellous casting of great actors supports the colourful beautiful and delightful story. In this novel young Sophie (gorgeously played by the 10-year-old Rebecca Hall) has eagerly waited for her older cousins to arrive to her aunt’s house at the

Janá ek?s 2nd String Quartet Intimate Letters is regarded as a highlight of the modern string quartet literature. It was written during the composer?s last year of life between 29 January and 19 February 1928 inspired by the ageing Janáèek?s exceptional love for Kamila Stösslová. The Moravian Quartet devoted themselves to this impressive work; Janá ek attended a total of three of their rehearsals in May and June 1928. This had several consequences including his abandoning his original idea of using a viola d?amore. After Janá ek?s unexpected death (12 August 1928) the uncertain genesis of the work became the greatest problem of the IntimateLetters : the surviving copies were not definitively authorised. The editors of this new edition have reverted to Janá ek?s autograph sketches as the main most reliable source and using these as a basis have reconstructed the work as it stood at the point of Janá ek?s death. The musical text taken from the Critical Complete Edition of the Works of Leo? Janá ek (Vol. E/4) therefore contains clear differences in comparison with older editions.

Par ROCHE COLIN. Je travaillais à mon second quatuor à cordes à la fin de l'année 2001, dans le cadre d'une commande du Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon pour le festival Musiques en Scène et le Quatuor Psophos. Ce quatuor à cordes était à l'origine prévu pour former une oeuvre écrite à quatre mains avec mon ami Guillaume Vautier. Notre idée de départ visait à confronter deux conceptions musicales de la lumière. Je l'ai écrite dans l'idée qu'elle puisse être aussi jouée seule. Dans mon esprit, cette période correspondait à une volonté d'aller vers un son sans artifice, qui ne se cacherait pas derrière une technique compositionnelle trop édulcorée. Décidé à me libérer, ce quatuor était une remise à plat de mon esthétique. Je travaillais à des couleurs instrumentales blanches, voire translucides, lorsque je vécu, comme tous, le traumatisme des attentats du 11 septembre 2001. Le blanc devint gris sombre, la lumière beaucoup plus opaque. C'était la seule façon pour moi d'aller au bout de l'écriture: ne pas faire comme si rien ne s'était passé et que ça n'avait pas d'incidences sur mon écriture. Rarement entreprise ne m'a paru aussi vaine sur le coup... et fondamentale après coup, car elle me permit de me poser les véritables questions: qu'écrire et pourquoi ? Quelques mois plus tard, le plasticien Simon Artignan me demanda s'il pouvait utiliser ma musique pour une de ses vidéos. J'acceptais avec honneur, et le laissait entièrement libre de son utilisation. Il m'invita en septembre au vernissage de son exposition. Je pu découvrir en avant première Petites économies de nos pollutions, qui marqua le début d'une très longue et passionnante collaboration. Elle marqua aussi le début d'un mode d'échange entre nous: nous n'intervenons jamais sur le travail de l'autre, et la plupart du temps, l'un s'appuie sur la création de l'autre. Ces rebonds successifs nous ont mené jusqu'à la création de La robe des choses - installation concertante en 2006. Colin Roche / contemporain / Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes

Par KOLBUSZ ALEKSANDRA. Long before writing Passalega, I harboured the idea of creating some form of organically homogeneous chain of musical tensions evolving ever more distinctly into a musical utterance, although still indeterminate in terms of pitch. The tissues forming the chain of those tensions were of relatively simple design, yet in spite of this ? or perhaps because of it ? they were incredibly well suited to generating the expressive narrative that accompanied me throughout that entire pre-composition period. After recognising the character of the musical potential in that material, I considered it to be similar to Baroque rhetoric in terms of the refined clarity and smoothness of the gestures. Inspired by this, I sought to articulate this material in the fullest possible way by tracing a chain of swelling tensions, referring to a homogeneously polyphonic string quartet. / Date parution : 2022-12-12/ Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes

Homunculus is a short (circa 12 minutes) work for string quartet which the composer wrote during the Autumn months of 2007 for the Johannes Quartet.He wanted to compose a piece that would be very compact in form andduration but still contain many different characters and textures. In other words a little piece that behaves like a big piece.He has long been fascinated (and amused) by the arcane spermists’ theory who held the beliefthat the sperm was in fact a 'little man' (homunculus) that was placed inside a woman for growth into a child. This seemed to them to neatly explain many of the mysteries of conception. It was later pointed out that if the spermwas a homunculus identical in all but size to an adult then the homunculus may have sperm of its own. This led to a reductio ad absurdum with an endless chain of homunculi. This was not necessarily considered by spermists afatal objection however as it neatly explained how it was that 'in Adam' all had sinned: the whole of humanity was already contained in his loins.He decided to call my piece Homunculus despite the obvious weaknesses of thespermists’ thinking as he found the idea of a perfect little man strangely moving.