SKU: BT.WH31498

ISBN 9788759824603. English.

String Quartet No.4 was composed by Hans Abrahamsen in 2012. Commissioned by Westdeutscher Rundfunk and Wigmore Hall For the Arditti Quartet. Programme note: The basic idea for my Fourth String Quartet was very clear to me: It should be quiet and soft music or to put it in a german term: hoch im Himmel gesungen ... (”High singing in heaven…”). Each of the four movements has a different scordatura/pitch. The first movement begins like my work ”Schnee” sky-high with an airy and soft melody by the first violin. The second movement is fast and ”movement and joy”-like. It consists of two duets and a reverse style counterpoint. While the sections were progressively longerin the first movement they are getting shorter and shorter in the second. ”Dark, heavy and earthy” is the third movement and its pizzicato recalls big black raindrops falling to the ground. It is the dark and grainy counterpart to the first movement whereas the fourth movement corresponds to the second. The fourth movement was planned as a dark and heavy counterpart but it turned out to be like ”babbling” music of a child. My Fourth String Quartet has become in its way a serene and cool piece. So the Quartet has been finished luckyly after twenty years it was already in 1990 that I was commissioned by Wittener Tage für Neue Musik to write the piece for Arditti Quartet. Hans Abrahamsen.

SKU: HL.14028046

ISBN 9788759859377. 9.5x14.25x0.12 inches. International (more than one language).

Score available: KP00247 Ruders writes: Quartet No. 3 Motet was written in 1979, commissioned by the Lerchenborg music-week of 1979 during which it was first performed by Quatuor Bernede. This short one-movement quartet is a kind of modernization of the 14th century French motets, a cadeau to this weird and fantastic music whose abstract and almost deprecatory, introvert expression appears unaccountably modern and incredibly ancient at the same time. Motet is a sober, cool treatise on rhythm and statics, depicted in a Gothic, crypt-like atmosphere. The almost completely non-vibrato movement is suggestive of boys' choir, monks' processions, and the piercing sound of musical glasses. An ancient world is reborn and becomes the world of today.