The full score for String Quartet No.3 'Angel's Music' by Bent Sørensen (1988) Premiered by the Arditti String Quartet at the Danish Radio Concert Hall 16 November 1988. Parts available: KP00249The composer writes:'Even when I was writing 'Adieu' I knew that I wished to write 'Angel’s Music'. The title existed in an incomplete form in my mind and gradually more and more ideas and a few outlines became clear. The actual work on 'Angel’s Music' was started in Rome where I spent the autumn of 1987 staying at 'The Danish Academy'. Whether this stay has influenced the quartet or not is impossible to say. however it is true tosay that in the Roman churches I visited I saw countless angels playing in the top of frescoes and altars. Without these angels together with the many crackled-gold paintings in this city and my general fascination with the Italian renaissance painter Fra Angelico (in fact there are only a few paintings by him in Rome but even his name..!) I am not sure my quartet would have been what it is. Anyway I do feel that there is a bit of Italy in the piece. The angels apart there are in the short rhythmic agitating part of the quartet reminiscences of the Italian medieval Trotto dance and in the most expressive part of the piece there are flashes of Puccini-like music. From the very beginning of my work on the quartet the distant extremely muted sound in the high register which opens the piece was on my mind. A sound satiated with a dense heterophonic and polyphonic texture of elegiac melody and vibrating trills. I imagined that 'little songs' (maybe angel songs) could be created in this density these songs constantly echoing themselves. Gradually as this sound got a more and more concrete musical and instrumental form I felt that not only should the 'little songs' be created played and die out in an echo but also that the general pattern of the quartet should give the feeling of music which from the distance is getting closer and

String Quartet No.2 was composed by Hans Abrahamsen in 1981. Programme note: Hans Abrahamsens's second string quartet was commissioned by the Lerchenborg music-week of 1981 during which it was first performed by the Gaudeamus Quartet. In Hans Abrahamsen's second quartet it is the continuous alternation of soberness and drama that first catches the listner's ears: the lyrical/gestural tradition as we know it from Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg pitched - not against - but around the 'sober barbarism' which is characteristic of rhytmic neo-classicism. Both the first and the last movement of th is quartet are emotional at manylevels: sad - and still seething with life and always unpredictable in their development it is night twilight and white-hot light. Sparkling diamonds set off by scarlett velvet. The two middle movements link the contrasts without cushioning: the second movement a gruelling stripped rhythmical drill followed by a hushed far-off dance in triple meter which shifts and hesitates all the time though. There is an ambience of the classics glimpsed through many veils. The second quartet is music which is fraught with danger in its ambiguous relation to tradition: the past emerges as a most relevant and living ghost. The Beauty and the Beast as musical drama.

String Quartet No.4 by Poul Ruders dating from 2012. Programme Note: It might be of interest for some to note that a gap of only six months separates the writing of my second and third quartets (1979) but a 33 year interval stands between the third and the present piece String Quartet No. 4.Which is in five movements and is about nothing but itself. The first movement 'Adagio - Presto alla breve - Adagio' is an overture of sorts lifting the lid as it were on the odd bit of what happens later on in the other movements.A portal into: The second movement 'Vivo scherzando' which is justthat: a short (2 minutes only) fast and jocular piece leading up to the next movement: 'Adagio sognante' a slow and hushed dream-world paving the way for the pièce de resistance of the entire quartet: 'Presto alla breve' a ferociously fast tour de force for the four players who with that one under their belts can lean back a little (but only a little) and put the whole thing gently to bed in the fifth and final movement: a simple 'Adagio'. Off the record: my first string quartet (1972) has been withdrawn and is no more a fact that renders the numbering of the subsequent quartets a matter of personal conviction. Poul Ruders November 2012

Par ZIMMERMANN BERND ALOIS. With this edition, Schott publishes the early two-movement string quartet by Bernd Alois Zimmermann for the first time. In a letter the composer wrote: 'I am still messing around with my quartet. This probably is the most concentrated work of composition - and the most abstract.' The string quartet belongs within the context of his early works which focussed on chamber music, unlike those of later years. Until 1945, he created a number of piano pieces and songs, a Suite for Violin and Piano as well as a String Trio (ED 7563)./ Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes

This string quartet is a reflection on emperors and kings their works their passions and the inevitable passge of time. Specifically it follows the career of Artashes who ruled Armenia about twenty-two hundred years ago (190-160 BC) founded theArmenian capital Artashat and abducted his beautiful bride Satenik. The composer was struck by a 19th century painting of Artashes funeral with its grand and seemingly endless cortege the wailing throng lining the road the deceased king borne instate on a royal carriage all led by regal horsemen and a colorful phalanx of musicians. The music is divided into five short scenes played without pause: I. Cortege II. Theft III. Build IV. Cortege V. Farewell. Commissioned by the DilijanChamber Music Seriesfor the Lark Musical Society. Duration: c. 14 minutes