Canticle. Par JALBERT PIERRE. Canticle (String Quartet No. 6) was commissioned by the Chiara String Quartet. It consists of seven movements, highly contrasting in character, with movements I and VII serving as similar bookends to the overall arch of the work. The piece opens with the quartet members striking various crotales, producing bell sounds that eventually blend with the string quartet – evoking the title, Canticle. The faster, pulse-oriented music requires the players to use glass rods on their instruments and at one point quickly moves back and forth between alternating rhythmic subdivisions, producing extremely rapid metric modulations. The last movement blends the string quartet with the bowing of the crotales to produce an ethereal, other-worldly finale to the canticle. Pierre Jalbert / Niveau : Avancé / Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes

Mezmer for string quartet is an adaptation of the last movement of Re-Collecting ASTORoids, an earlier suite for orchestra from Kats-Chernin. Commissioned by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the suite was written in tribute to Astor Piazzolla and is clearly inspired by tango, though Kats-Chernin uses various rhythms as her source of inspiration. Mezmer is a miniature and has an intimate, smoky feel with a bluesy violin solo laden with vibrato. An air of solitude and reflection surrounds the piece. / Quatuor A Cordes

for String Quartet Score and Parts. Par HARTKE STEPHEN. THE FIFTH BOOK of the title refers to what Stephen Hartke considers his fifth book of madrigals, only two of which books are actually for voices, with the others being for string instruments. Hartke writes madrigals for string instruments due to their inherent singing quality, but also due to the fluid structural character of the madrigal as a genre that often responds in quite mercurial ways to the emotional unfolding of its text. These five movements are thus abstract madrigals whose larger outlines, shifts in mood, and various internal reminiscences are intended to convey a private, unspoken drama. Commissioned for the Brentano String Quartet by the Frankfurt Burgerstiftung im Holzhausenschlosschen sponsored by the Ernst Max von Grunelius-Stiftung. / Date parution : 2020-04-11/ Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes

Par LIANG LEI. Gobi Gloria belongs to a series of compositions that grew out of my admiration for Mongolian music. The series include Feng (for cello solo, written for Feng Hew), Gobi Polyphony (for erhu and cello, written for Xu Ke), Gobi Canticle (for violin and cello, written for Masuko Ushioda and Laurence Lesser), and Serashi Fragments (written for the Arditti Quartet). The melody is played against its own inversion, retrograde and retrograde-inversion in an otherwise mostly heterophonic texture. The piece alludes to various genres of Mongolian music that include the longchant, as well as the music of dance and shaman rituals. It concludes with a rendering of a folk song that I heard during my visit to Nei Monggol region in 1996./ Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes

Par FREEMAN ALEX. Alex Freeman found initial inspiration for his string quartet (2015) in a series of photographs a geologist friend showed him of en échelon veins in rock formations. The open strings punctuated with pizzicato unisons that begin the single-movement work call to mind something crystalline and shimmering, which is immediately infused with tumbling lyrical lines in something of a rapid caccia technique throughout. The middle of the work becomes more suspended in slower material loosely based on a technique of prolation canon, comprises layers of free, expressive, lyrical, and even elegiac music moving at different speeds. As the work concludes, the materials converge in a rhythmically pulsating stasis and an almost chorale-like statement. Duration: c. 13' This product includes the score and the parts (A4 sized). American-Finnish composer Alex Freeman (b.1972) has established himself among the foremost composers of choral music in Finland. A dedicated citizen of his musical community, a teacher, and a choral singer himself, he composes music that reflects an appreciation for a wide range of aesthetics and a passion for communicating with listeners and performers. In his choral works, in particular, we find music that aims to be sonorous, melodic, and resonant, but is always crafted to carefully avoid the cliches that can burden conventional tonality. His instrumental works run the gamut: a cantata with orchestra based on poetry of Whitman; a significant body of solo piano works that reveal deep roots in everything from austere absolute music to soaring elegaic rhetoric (see Albany Records, Inner Voice); his chamber work Blueshift (Navona Records), which is a kind of paean to Reich and Adams in miniature; open-ended modular works, like various iterations of his Slow All Clocks for electronic media, solo clarinet, and mixed choirs of kanteles; and, recently, some new directions in microtonal music. / Date parution : 2022-05-31/ Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes