SKU: HL.51487272
UPC: 840126989366. 6.75x9.5x0.245 inches.
Alexander Zemlinsky's music was long unjustly overshadowed by what was regarded as the “more progressive†Second Viennese School. Although Zemlinsky was close friends with its protagonist Arnold Schönberg, he never did take the latter's radical step into dodecaphony. At the same time, he composed works that were no less original or fully fledged. Composed between 1913 and 1915, his Second String Quartet in particular pushed the contemporaneous understanding of form and tonality to its limits. With just one movement but spanning over 1,200 measures, this multi-faceted work numbers among the most significant contributions to the genre of the time and has long merited a critical new edition. The Urtext edition by G. Henle Publishers corrects many errors and inaccuracies in the first edition that came to light after careful comparison with the autograph sources in Vienna and Washington. For the first time, too, the metronome markings that survive only in one of Zemlinsky's letters have been incorporated. Editorial work was kindly supported by the Alexander Zemlinsky Endowment Fund in Vienna.
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SKU: HL.51481272
UPC: 840126989250. 9.0x12.0x0.348 inches.
SKU: FG.55011-510-1
ISBN 9790550115101.
Matt hew Whittall's preface to Bright Ferment (2019): I have a complicated history with the string quartet. Actually, it's not that complicated. I spent months writing a huge one in my early twenties and hastily withdrew it after a long delayed premiere, vowing never to write another. In a typical case of karmic retribution, my fear of the form would eventually be overcome by the unrefusable offer to write the compulsory piece for the Banff International String Quartet Competition in my native Canada. The short duration requested, about nine minutes, also felt like a good way to wade gingerly back into the medium. The title was originally just a nice-sounding pair of words that surfaced in a brainstorming session with fellow composer Alex Freeman over an injudicious amount of fermented barley. When I looked it up later, I found that it was a phrase of older coinage, seemingly used more for poetic resonance than any fixed meaning. Ferment by itself denotes a state of confusion, change or lack of order. With bright, it takes on a more positive connotation with regard to society and creativity: a wild profusion of ideas barely checked by reason. (It may not actually mean that, but it describes this piece nicely, so let's go with it.) Fermentation in its trendy culinary usage is also hinted at via a recurrent percolating device of scattered pizzicati. As one may guess from the tone of this introduction, there is little attempt at gravity in Bright Ferment, the only means by which I felt I could sidestep the historical and expressive weight of the string quartet genre. Styles, gestures and moods are tossed around, cross-cut and abandoned in stream-of-consciousness fashion, connected by little except an intuitive sense of rightness in their juxtaposition. If the piece acquires depth in spite of me, it will only be because its disparate parts amplify and strengthen each other simply by being together - much like the ensemble itself. Bright Ferment was commissioned by the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, with additional funding from the Americas Society (New York), for the 2019 Banff International String Quartet Competition. Duration: ca. 9 minutes.
SKU: HL.50603532
UPC: 840126931181.
As premiered by the virtuoso French string quartet Quatour Diotima in Copenhagen in October 2018.
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SKU: HL.14033404
ISBN 9788759874769. Danish.
The Wings Of Night for Trombone and String Quartet was composed by Bent Sorensen in 1998, as a commission from the Warsaw Autumn for Christian Lindberg and the Silesian String Quartet. Programme note: I do not yet know what to write about this short piece which I have just finished. But like my Piano Concerto LA NOTTE, it seems to take place at night-time - or perhaps it is only because I wrote the piece by night. In short, the title is from Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet'.Juliet sings to the night - the night of love: 'Come, night, come Romeo, come, thou day in night, For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night, Whither than new snow upon a raven's back.THE WINGS OFNIGHT was composed as a commission from the Warsaw Autumn for Christian Lindberg and the Silesian String Quartet. (Bent Sorensen).
SKU: PE.EP72822
ISBN 9790577011769. 232 x 303mm inches. English.
I have only visited Damascus once, twenty years ago, on the way to Palmyra. I had a purpose (I was writing music for a play about Palmyra’s Queen Zenobia) but essentially I was a tourist. Like any visitor, I was thrilled to step out of the noisy modern city into the magical ancient world of the walled Old City, its vibrant souk leading to the magnificent mosque, and a labyrinth of winding, narrow streets filled with the smell of unleavened bread.
In Palmyra, I was met with extraordinary kindness everywhere. On one occasion, a little Bedouin boy noticed that I was risking sunstroke wandering bare-headed among the spectacular ruins: he showed me how to tie a turban, then took me to have tea with his family in their tent.
Since then, I have watched helplessly as these places of wonder have been devastated and their inhabitants scattered and killed. When the Sacconi Quartet suggested that I might choose a Syrian poet for our collaboration, I welcomed the idea.
I searched for a long time to find a contemporary poet whose work might gain from any music I could imagine. I felt it was important to find first-hand accounts of the Syrian experience – but, of course, I was always reading them in translation. In an anthology called Syria Speaks, I was astonished to read something that looked like prose, but was full of poetry. It was Anne-Marie McManus’s fine translation of Ali Safar’s A Black Cloud in a Leaden White Sky – an eloquent, thoughtful, contained yet vivid account of life in a war-torn country, all the more moving for its restraint.
In setting these words, I have not attempted to imitate Syrian music. However, there is what might be called a linguistic accommodation in my choice of scale, or mode. Several movements are in a mode that I first discovered while writing a cantata commemorating the First World War: it has a tuning that I associate with war, its violence and desolation. This eight-note mode is similar to scales found in Syrian music. I did not choose it in the abstract: it emerged from the harmonies I was exploring in the earlier work, and emerged again as I was looking for the right musical colours to set Ali Safar’s words. In this work, its Arabic aspect is more prominent. - Jonathan Dove
SKU: PR.11441586S
UPC: 680160612987. 8.5 x 11 inches.
Nicholas Yasillo's wife was much taken with medieval-era decorated volumes of prayers and religious scenes, known as the Book of Hours. As such, he commissioned Garrop for a work in her honor. Garrop appropriately uses her String Quartet No. 4 to describe not just five scenes from The Hours by Catherine of Cleves (c. 1400's), but a reading of the book and personal discovery of each illustration (Illuminations). The work was written for the Cecilia Quartet, who gave the premiere in September, 2011. For advanced perfomers. Duration: 19'.
SKU: PR.114415860
UPC: 680160612963. 8.5 x 11 inches.
SKU: HL.257817
Peter Gregson's The Day Before was composed in 2017.
SKU: HL.14037520
ISBN 9780711946866. UPC: 884088579593. 9.25x12.0x0.31 inches.
A series of popular music for working string quartets. Light enjoyable repertoire pieces and entertaining encores. Contents: Chelsea Bridge * Fly Me to the Moon (In Other Words) * Satin Dol * Take the 'A' Train * The Girl from Ipanema.
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: HL.14015171
ISBN 9788759878224. Danish.
Quartetto Sereno - String Quartet No.21 Op.197 (op. posth.) by Vagn Holmboe.
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 stringquartets. The first movement takes the form of one long arch in a rocking triple time which constantly shifts among 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.