Robert Morris: Carnatic String Quartet
The interesting thing about Robert Morris’s (b. 1943) remarkable career as a composer (and a theorist) is how free he is to move from composing works of great rigor with intricate integrity in his use of pitch-class design, to works of sonic beauty to be performed in a natural outdoor environment, to imaginative electronic/computer music, to the music of acculturation. Among the latter, his monumental Carnatic String Quartet is an outstanding example. In his own words: “Carnatic String Quartet (…
Bandits of Stature
Darla is pleased to offer a new record of string quartets by Harold Budd. Bandits of Stature is a first as it comprises 14 compact Budd composed string quartets played by the Formalist Quartet.
György Kurtág: Secreta
Bastille Musique presents its fortieth release »György Kurtág: Secreta« featuring Quatuor Béla. The album contains a new studio production of Kurtág’s complete works for string quartet from 1959 to 2011, including the first recording of a previously unpublished composition. The recordings, produced by the SWR, are complemented by a 56-page bilingual booklet (EN, DE) with texts by Tobias Bleek, a conversation with the quartet and the recording producer, several autograph pages and two concertina-…
John Cage, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, George Crumb, Lejaren Hiller, Christian Wolff, Stefan Wolpe, Jacob Druckman, Leon Kirchner
The Avant Garde String Quartet In The U.S.A. (3LP box)Cage's beautiful and unusual 1950 string quartet in a monumental compilation released as a 3LP box set by Vox in 1973 with a who's who of the American avant-garde, including Crumb's and Kirchner's outstanding quartets with electric amplification and electronics, with impeccable performances by the Concord String Quartet. With insert.
Glorious Mahalia
Midway through Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic speech at the 1963 March on Washington, a voice rang out from behind him: “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” That voice belonged to Mahalia Jackson, King’s close friend and one of the most revered gospel singers of the 20th century. Glorious Mahalia, a visionary tribute to Jackson’s life by the internationally renowned Kronos Quartet, uses that moment as a springboard to explore the depth of Jackson’s musical craft and its impact on the Civil Ri…
Contemporary Hungarian Chamber Music (LP)
Four string quartets (one plus cimbalom) by as many Hungarian contemporary music composers released on Hungaroton in 1975.
New Music For String Quartet (LP)
Compositions for string quartet spanning from 1949 to 1965 released on Mainstream's avant-garde series directed by Earle Brown.
Trio À Cordes / Quatuors À Cordes (LP)
Contemporary music for string trio and quartet performed by the Arditti Quartet and released on Harmonia Mundi's "Evénement / Musique française d'aujourd'hui" series in 1984.
Arditti
1990 release ** "Arditti", presents a typically challenging Arditti programme, beginning with Beethoven's Grosse Fuge (1826), which comes over well from their modernist standpoint. Conlon Nancarrow's String Quartet No. 3 (1987) comes next - Nancarrow had said that the Grosse Fuge was the only music he would want his quartet to follow, and they make an illuminating pairing. Ruth Crawford Seeger's magnificent String Quartet (1931) has had several fine recordings, and this one is one of the best - …
A Dark Flaring
A Dark Flaring marks the Signum Quartett’s impressive return to ECM’s New Series after debuting for the label with striking performances on Erkki-Sven Tüür’s acclaimed chamber music recording Lost Prayers (2020). Here, the quartet has put together a unique programme dedicated to six South African composers, born in the 20th century, whose works for string quartet are united by the way they blend respect for the past with an instinct for the future in a wide-flung idiomatic scope. Whether writing…
Sky Chord / Haptic Space
The music of Ron Caines arranged for solo piano, string quartet and piano quintet by Laura Cole.
Short Stories
2019 release ** "In most of Ana Sokolović’s work, an extra-musical element serves as a source of inspiration. This particular compositional process is intimately linked to the importance of “pluralities” for Sokolović; a diversity of approaches, putting different art forms in dialogue. Short Stories by Sokolović’s long-term collaborator, Quatuor Bozzini, enables us to listen to the encounter taking place between the composer’s artistic sensitivity and four of her sources of inspiration. In the r…
Yunagi
*250 copies limited edition* Composer Taizo Hida was born in 1972 and lives in Osaka. In 2022, the album of rain, in which pianist Satoko Inoue performs compositions by Hida, was released on Ftarri Classical and received high praise. Two new albums have been issued simultaneously on Ftarri Classical in order to showcase the richness of Taizo Hida’s creativity. One of these is the CD Yunagi.
The CD consists of five tracks, "Yunagi 1" to "Yunagi 5." Hida composed "Yunagi 1" in June of 2020. He lat…
Kurtág, Lutoslawski, Gubaidulina
1994 release ** "The Arditti Quartet here performs all three of Kurtag's string quartets, along with Lutoslawski's one quartet, and Gubaidulina's second as well -- the recordings are from 1990. Kurtag's quartets are some of the finest of the 20th century, clearly fusing Webern and Bartok. What distinguishes Arditti's Kurtag from the Keller Quartet on ECM? (see my review). The AQ takes the tempos slightly faster. Not too fast, in fact I'd say if anything the KQ has slowed them down for dramatic e…
String Quartets
2025 stock ** "String Quartet 1, 2 et 3 composed by Reinhold Friedl (Zeitkratzer) and performed by Quatuor Diotima. Reinhold Friedl’s string quartets do not pretend to be string quartets, they are anti-Goethe. There is no sophisticated conversation of four elder gentlemen, sitting in armchairs. The music is physical work for the performers and intended to be physical pleasure for the listeners. All three quartets are based on the same idea: smooth transformations from a given texture into anothe…
A Root Or Mirror, Blossom, Madder, Cracks; Together
"[..] With Rebecca Bruton’s piece, the melody/ harmony is transmuted into something psychedelic by manifesting its essential indivisibility from the shifting textures of the music as a whole. There’s often an ephemeral virtuosity to this music, an intricate (sometimes opaque, sometimes disorientingly transparent), florid weave of sound. But this virtuosity doesn’t assert dramatic effects; there are gestures here, but they’re the movements of sounding bodies, not the quasi-meaningful gesticulatio…
Streichquartette 3 + 4
Major contemporary composer finally getting the vinyl treatment he deserves! Grosskopf has been a key figure in the Berlin new music scene since the 70s - his string quartets are precise, luminous constructions that breathe and pulse with an inner logic all their own.
On A Dark Night
*2024 stock* Berlin Strings is a string quartet consisting of Lisa Marie Vogel, Johanna Wundling, Tabea Haarmann-Thiemann and Luisa Babarro Fernández. Since meeting in the National Youth Orchestra and founding Berlin Strings 13 years ago, they have developed into explorers of their own sound. A sound that has always been imbued with the discipline of classical music, pure craftsmanship, the sublime rules of composition that make communication wordless. But also experimentation, flirting with dis…
String Quartet No. 4
Swiss composer Jürg Frey writes masterful soundscapes, calm and vast. With his sensitive ear for colour, sound and precision, he composes music of great serenity and lyricism; a poetic weightlessness in search of silence in sound. “My music is slow, sometimes static, often delicately shifting between standstill and movement. And yet, after more than an hour, this music has arrived at another place. Standstill, little happens, — it is this atmosphere from which my music emerges and to which it al…
Passage
Jason Eckardt’s composition Passage is a profound exploration of the unsettling history surrounding the CIA’s interest in sensory deprivation and its impact on human psychology. Divided into three movements – Subject, Ascension, and Testify – Eckardt delves into the dark legacy of interrogation techniques, shedding light on the use of sound and light as weapons in various global conflicts. In a separate work, pulse-echo, Eckardt transforms the piano into a resonant body, drawing inspiration from…