For String Quartet In Quarter-Tone System. Par WYSCHNEGRADSKY IVAN ALEXANDROWITSCH. / Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes

The Composer writes: 'In February 1987 I saw in the Tate Gallery in London a painting by the Victorian English painter John William Waterhouse. The painting kept haunting my memory and as I at the same time planned to write a piece for solo Viola my ideas for the music and the memory of the painting fused more and more. I decided then to let my piece borrow the title of Waterhouse’s painting: The Lady Of Shalott. The picture of a mad-like pale and perhaps singing woman alone in a boat without sculls which calmly slips out from the rush growth of the river is an illustration for the ending of Alfred Tennyson’s poem by the same title which again plaits into theold English legends about King Arthur. My piece tries to meander - like the river at Camelot - among these sources.' As suggested above the piece was originally written for Viola solo. This version for String Quartet is from 1993.

Pour Quator á Cordes-Born in 1947 Laurent Duvillier-Wable trained under pianist Suzanne Joly and studied composition with Michel Puig. The latter a student of Ren? Leibowitz introduced him to the mysteries of Sch?nberg and Webern's twelve-note composition. To create a coherent œuvre Duvillier-Wable drew on the array of possibilities offered by chamber music in his series of six Sonatas composed between 1992 and 2007. Sonata IV For String Quartet was written in 1994 the year his father – painter Ren? Duvillier a friend of Charles Estienne and Andr? Breton – fell gravely ill. Divided into four movements thecomposition contains two beautifully expressive musical references: the Lamento religioso refers to Bach's Passion according to Saint Matthew by quoting the choral 'Was ist die Ursache aller solcher Plagen' (No.19: What is the cause of all this suffering?) when Jesus distressed by his imminent agony asks his disciples to watch over him. The Agitato final borrows the inexorable 'Must it be? It must!' theme from Beethoven's Quartet No.16 in F that crowns this poignant work.

The composer made this arrangement of the Third String Quartet for string orchestra in March 2003. The first performance was given by the Eos Orchestra New York conducted by Ken Selden in the Concert Hall Ethical CulturalSociety New York City on 24 April 2003.Quoting composer: In the summer of 1989 I composed a choral work Out of the Ruins for Agnieszka Piotrowska’s BBC2 documentary which dealt with the physical and emotional responsesof some of the inhabitants of Leninakhan to the earthquake which devastated Armenia the previous December. When he heard the recording of the work that I made with the Holy Echmiadzin Chorus under the fervent conducting of KhorenMeykhanejian Alex Balanescu suggested turning Out of the Ruins into a string quartet. There seemed no reason or opportunity to do this until I felt the need to add to the intensity of my experiences in Armenia the no lessprofound experience of witnessing the images of the Romanian revolution on television during the latter part of December 1989.Just as the structure of my Third String Quartet (1990) may connect it with the First so they alsoshare a debt to Thurston Dart (my professor at King’s College London between 1961 and 1965). It was Dart who had the inspiration to send me to Romania in 1965 ostensibly to study folk music. The volumes of transcriptions that Ibrought back with me had remained unopened until with this proposed ‘celebratory’ string quartet (though at the time it was difficult to know quite what to celebrate in postrevolutionary Romania) an occasion arose where I coulduse this material in what seemed to me was a non-exploitative manner. The compositional procedure was as follows: to take Out of the Ruins as a template on which the Romanian vocal or instrumental music would besuperimposed quite often stretched into new intervallic shapes through the demands of the completely pre-formed harmonic structure.