Lubo? Fi?er (1935?1999) was one of the most distinctive figures of Czech music in the 20th century and composed the Variations on an Unknown Theme in 1976. The ?unknown theme? was a prankish eight-bar theme from Fi?er?s student days. In the elation following the home-team win over Canada on 15 March 1959, he made a bet with his colleague Kalach to compose a concert piece for violin and orchestra with the working title ?Canada-Rondo?. The whimsical contest was abandoned, but Fi?er did not forget the theme and he later created variations on it for his new composition for the Talich Quartet. The Variations on an Unknown Theme have now been published for the first time ever. This edition is based on the autograph of the score which is housed in the Czech Museum of Music in Prague.

Par BACEWICZ GRAZYNA. Studying the sketches for works which a composer considers to be finished, perfected, is a fascinating activity. It enables one to penetrate the secrets of creative work, to compare the initial outline of a composition with its final version. A sketch is generally left untitled, but it does occur that a composer enhances the status of such a draft by giving it a title, before creating an improved version of that title on the basis of the finished work. The list of compositions by Grazyna Bacewicz, the full catalogue of which is held in the National Library in Warsaw, includes a work for string quartet entitled Quatuor. The manuscript was left undated, but analysis of the music allows us to date this work to the mid-1960s. In the composer?s output from that period, the instrumental tone colouring, often an element that helps to forge a work, takes on particular significance. The first movement of the Quatuor [à cordes] opens with three fifth-tritone chords ?cast forth?, in succession, in saltando-gettato technique by the cello, second violin and first violin. When we look at the beginning of the Seventh String Quartet, from 1965, such a chord appears in the second bar of the cello part. Further comparisons lead to interesting conclusions. The two opening movements are almost identical, built from the same elements, only spatially arranged in a different way. In the structure of the first movement of the Seventh Quartet, one distinguishes two thematic planes, which shape the narrative after the fashion of a sonata allegro. The first theme is a series of episodes of changing texture ? from passagework to chords and short glissandos repeated with varying intensity. The second theme (Meno mosso) displays an imitative form. Both works feature an inverted reprise. For the first 25 bars of the second movement, a nostalgic Grave, the two works sound identical. The continuation of this movement in the Quatuor [à cordes] is more modest than in the analogous segments of the Seventh Quartet, in terms of both changing textures and the use of differentiated means of articulation. Towards the end, a motif from the beginning of this movement returns in modified form. Both the third movements (Capriccioso in the Quatuor [à cordes], Con vivezza in the Seventh Quartet) take the form of a rondo, and appearing in each of them is the same ?warbling? theme, based on scattered notes with grace notes. The Seventh String Quartet is in three movements. The presumed prototype consists of four movements. The last movement of the Quatuor [à cordes] is a Maestoso resembling a mine of textural ideas for other works of a sonoristic provenance from this period. The introduction, constituting a closed narrative whole and a reference point for the rest of the movement, is followed by segments that are dominated by ostinatos of various kinds, including with the use of harmonics, passages built on the progressive shifting of short motifs, and unevenly spread chords. Grazyna Bacewicz used material from earlier works more than once in her compositions. Her oeuvre also includes ?twin? pieces merely scored for a different set of instruments. Yet the self-quotation that occurs in the case of the Quatuor [à cordes] and the Seventh String Quartet ? lengthy passages from another of her works reused with minor modifications ? is an unusual situation. It undermines the former?s status as an independent work. Malgorzata Gasiorowska/ Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes

Par COHEN MARY. Carol Stringfest presents popular carols in flexible arrangements for string quartet, beginner strings and duet. The books in the series can be used independently or in conjunction with one another. The inclusion of very simple parts for absolute beginners and an optional piano accompaniment, to support less confident groups, makes the series valuable to a wide range of abilities. Lyrics are also provided, so there is something for everyone, a must for Christmas! / Niveau : Débutant / Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes

Par FREEMAN ALEX. Alex Freeman found initial inspiration for his string quartet (2015) in a series of photographs a geologist friend showed him of en échelon veins in rock formations. The open strings punctuated with pizzicato unisons that begin the single-movement work call to mind something crystalline and shimmering, which is immediately infused with tumbling lyrical lines in something of a rapid caccia technique throughout. The middle of the work becomes more suspended in slower material loosely based on a technique of prolation canon, comprises layers of free, expressive, lyrical, and even elegiac music moving at different speeds. As the work concludes, the materials converge in a rhythmically pulsating stasis and an almost chorale-like statement. Duration: c. 13' This product includes the score and the parts (A4 sized). American-Finnish composer Alex Freeman (b.1972) has established himself among the foremost composers of choral music in Finland. A dedicated citizen of his musical community, a teacher, and a choral singer himself, he composes music that reflects an appreciation for a wide range of aesthetics and a passion for communicating with listeners and performers. In his choral works, in particular, we find music that aims to be sonorous, melodic, and resonant, but is always crafted to carefully avoid the cliches that can burden conventional tonality. His instrumental works run the gamut: a cantata with orchestra based on poetry of Whitman; a significant body of solo piano works that reveal deep roots in everything from austere absolute music to soaring elegaic rhetoric (see Albany Records, Inner Voice); his chamber work Blueshift (Navona Records), which is a kind of paean to Reich and Adams in miniature; open-ended modular works, like various iterations of his Slow All Clocks for electronic media, solo clarinet, and mixed choirs of kanteles; and, recently, some new directions in microtonal music. / Date parution : 2022-05-31/ Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes

After a twelve-year interval, Dvo?ák once again turned his attention to the string quartet in summer 1893. He had been musical director in New York since autumn 1892 and spent the summer in Spillville (Iowa) where a group of Czech immigrants had settled, thus making him feel at home. The beautiful natural surroundings led him to write this unconventional string quartet in the tradition of Beethoven's 'Pastoral? - even down to the imitation of birdcalls. Since the first performances, certain rhythmic and melodic characteristics have been traced back to the influences of the folk music of Native Americans and African Americans, which led to the soon popular work being called the 'American Quartet?. For the first time since 1955, the quartet is once again being published in an Urtext edition. / 2 Violons, Alto Et Violoncelle

Par BACEWICZ GRAZYNA. Grazyna Bacewicz realised at a very early age that her main purpose in life was to compose music. Already during the 1920s, as a student of Lódz Conservatoire, as part of her lessons in harmony and counterpoint, she made attempts at composing, in which she tried to resolve nagging technical problems and impart an artistically satisfying form to them. She grew up in an atmosphere of anti-romantic tumult and the emerging neoclassical style. She assimilated the main attributes of that current in a natural way: the need to forge logical formal constructs based on new harmonic principles, not determined by the major–minor system, and also a freedom in the shaping of textures, a fixed element of which was the combining of homophony with more or less strict polyphonic forms. One example of such a strategy is the String Quartet from her student years, signed with the date 1929–1930, which the composer did not include in her official catalogue of works. In the first movement (Allegro moderato), one can distinguish two principal subjects, served in the form of the incomplete exposition of a fugue. The chromaticised first subject, with its strongly highlighted head motif, appears in the cello, with an answer coming four bars later in the first violin. After a short bridge, the first violin intones the second subject, of a different character (dolce), and the answer appears a bar later and an octave lower in the viola. Both subjects can be heard also in the closing coda, and the space between them is filled by counterpoints based largely on ostinato figures of various sorts – a technique that Bacewicz would hone to perfection in her later work. The middle fughetta (Molto adagio), with a subject stated just once, and in only three parts (cello, first violin, viola), acts as an intermezzo. The third movement (Allegro molto moderato) is a double fugue with strongly contrasting subjects. The first subject, in the form of a chromaticised melodic continuum, exposed by the cello, is initially shown with the traditional arrangement retained (answered by the viola and second violin at a fifth, and by the first violin an octave above). The second subject (energico) is a structure shaped by the opening repetition of a motif of perfect fifths, then octaves combined with staccato-tremolo figurations. As the work unfolds, the two subjects appear simultaneously in original and inverted form, coming together in the closing Cadenza in a uniform idea crowned by strong (fff) chords repeated towards the end. - Malgorzata Gasiorowska/ Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes