Abrahamsen: String Quartets 1 - 4 Arditti String Quartet

• Hans Abrahamsen (b. 1952):String Quartet No. 4:
• 1 I Light and Airy (High in the Sky Singing) 06:23
• 2 II with Motion (Dance of Light) 03:48
• 3 III Dark, Heavy and Earthy (With a Heavy Groove) 06:18
• 4 IV Gently "Rocking" (With Utmost Sensitivity, Babbling) 03:58
• String Quartet No. 3:
• 5 I Calmo, con tenerezza e simplicita 00:59
• 6 II 05:14
• 7 III 00:51
• 8 IV Molto tranquillo et lontano legato 04:20
• String Quartet No. 2:
• 9 I Andante espressivo 03:44
• 10 II Vivo, ben ritmico 02:23
• 11 III Tranquillo con delicatezza 04:32
• 12 IV Presto energico 05:12
• 10 Preludes (String Quartet No. 1):
• 13 1 02:30
• 14 2 01:14
• 15 3 02:21
• 16 4 01:27
• 17 5 03:21
• 18 6 02:12
• 19 7 01:28
• 20 8 02:51
• 21 9 01:56
• 22 10 01:17
• Total Runtime 01:08:19

Info for Abrahamsen: String Quartets 1 - 4

Hans Abrahamsen is one of the most important composers of his generation. Winter & Winter’s lastest publication „let me tell you“ is a phenomenal success. Now Winter & Winter presents his string quartets 1, 2, 3, and 4 performed by the Arditti String Quartet, one of the world's leading string quartets. Arditti presents an excellent interpretations of the fascinating compositions by Abrahamsen.

Some composers identify early on with a particular genre. A quick glance at a list of works by the Dane Hans Abrahamsen seems to indicate a very different attitude. The profusion of titles suggests a mind that picks up a form, engages with it for the duration of the work itself, and then moves on to something fresh. There has been one significant exception however - the string quartet.

Abrahamsen's four quartets span almost the whole of his composing career: Quartet No. 1 was composed in 1973, when Abrahamsen was in his early-twenties; Quartet No. 4 appeared in 2012, as he entered his sixties. Not only so, but the quartets also draw a vital thread across the chasm at the heart of his life's work. In the 1990s Abrahamsen experienced a compositional crisis, and a long period of creative silence followed. It was only with the turn of the millennium that ideas began to flow again: the breakthrough began in 2000 with the Piano Concerto he wrote for his wife Anne Marie Abildskov.

So we have two pairs of quartets, perched either side of this nearly ten year-long hiatus [Abrahamsen likes to call it a 'fermata'], each the product of a particular decade. To an extent they can be heard to reflect the changing stylistic emphases and ideologies of their times, but the more one gets to know the music, the more these reflections resemble light glancing off the surface of water: it's what's going on below that surface that becomes truly absorbing.

Nature imagery is unavoidable when discussing Abrahamsen's music, and the composer makes no attempt to discourage it. Air, silence, the way natural processes constantly return to and recycle used resources - all of this finds a radical fulfillment in the astonishing Quartet No. 4 [2012]. The first movement [high in the sky singing] is almost entirely piano, dolcissimo, employing nothing but harmonics throughout. The instruments enter in fabulously slow imitation, in two great symmetrical waves, punctuated at the mid-point and at the end by two extremely high cello harmonics, pianissimo. The third movement then revisits and reworks this movement hushed, airy, light-filled textures and canonic structure, recreating them as something 'Dark, earthy and heavy', sub-headed "with a heavy groove".

A similar relationship unites and contrasts the second movement [dance of light] and the 'Gently "rocking"', 'babbling' fourth movement. So many of Abrahamsen's earlier preoccupations fuse in this music: the extreme simplicity of minimalism, the canons and invertible counterpoint of Bach, the sense of expression increasingly pared down in Schubert's Winterreise - echoing the wintry preoccupations of his recent chamber cycle Schnee ['Snow', 2006], and the opera he is currently working on, The Snow Queen. At the same time it is a celebration of all that has been subliminally learned, and distilled, during that long, difficult creative silence of the 1990s….

Arditti Quartet

The Arditti Quartet
enjoys a world-wide reputation for their spirited and technically refined interpretations of contemporary and earlier 20th century music. Many hundreds of string quartets and other chamber works have been written for the ensemble since its foundation by first violinist Irvine Arditti in 1974. Many of these works have left a permanent mark on 20th century repertoire and have given the Arditti Quartet a firm place in music history. World premieres of quartets by composers such as Ades, Andriessen, Aperghis, Birtwistle, Britten, Cage, Carter, Denisov, Dillon, Dufourt, Dusapin, Fedele, Ferneyhough, Francesconi, Gubaidulina, Guerrero, Harvey, Hosokawa, Kagel, Kurtag, Lachenmann, Ligeti, Maderna, Manoury, Nancarrow, Reynolds, Rihm, Scelsi, Sciarrino, Stockhausen and Xenakis and hundreds more show the wide range of music in the Arditti Quartet’s repertoire.

The ensemble believes that close collaboration with composers is vital to the process of interpreting modern music and therefore attempts to work with every composer it plays.

The players’ commitment to educational work is indicated by their masterclasses and workshops for young performers and composers all over the world.

The Arditti Quartet’s extensive discography now features over 190 CDs. 42 CD's were released as part of the ensemble's series on Naive Montaigne. This series set the trend, by presenting numerous contemporary composer features, recorded in their presence as well as the first digital recordings of the complete Second Viennese School's chamber music for strings. The quartet has recorded for more than 20 other CD labels and together this CD collection is the most extensive available of quartet literature in the last 40 years. To name just a few, Berio, Cage, Carter, Lachenmann, Ligeti, Nono, Rihm, the complete chamber music of Xenakis and Stockhausen's infamous Helicopter Quartet. Some of the most recent releases are with the French company Aeon and include profiles of Harvey, Dusapin, Birtwistle and Gerhard. For 2014, Ferneyhough's complete quartets and trios will also be released on this label.

Over the past 30 years, the ensemble has received many prizes for its work. They have won the Deutsche Schallplatten Preis several times and the Gramophone Award for the best recording of contemporary music in 1999 (Elliott Carter) and 2002 (Harrison Birtwistle). In 2004 they were awarded the 'Coup de Coeur' prize by the Academie Charles Cros in France for their exceptional contribution to the dissemination of contemporary music. The prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize was awarded to them in 1999 for ‘lifetime achievement’ in music. They remain to this day, the only ensemble ever to receive it.

The complete archive of the Arditti quartet is housed in the Sacher Foundation in Basle, Switzerland.

This album contains no booklet.