Par LIANG LEI. Gobi Gloria belongs to a series of compositions that grew out of my admiration for Mongolian music. The series include Feng (for cello solo, written for Feng Hew), Gobi Polyphony (for erhu and cello, written for Xu Ke), Gobi Canticle (for violin and cello, written for Masuko Ushioda and Laurence Lesser), and Serashi Fragments (written for the Arditti Quartet). The melody is played against its own inversion, retrograde and retrograde-inversion in an otherwise mostly heterophonic texture. The piece alludes to various genres of Mongolian music that include the longchant, as well as the music of dance and shaman rituals. It concludes with a rendering of a folk song that I heard during my visit to Nei Monggol region in 1996./ Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes

Par BARGIELSKI ZBIGNIEW . After the first performance of my Fourth Quartet, in Salzburg in 1997, the artists of the excellent Hugo Wolf Quartett approached me with the appealing proposition that I write a new quartet. Rather problematic, however, proved to be the musicians’ delicate suggestion that I invest the work with elements of a more pungent expression and elements of folklore – ideally Polish. That suggestion meant that I did not immediately come to a decision, since folklore had not been (with the exception of a few works for accordion) the object of my interest. However, in defiance of my aesthetic outlook at that time, I decided to take up this interesting invitation and tackle what was for me a difficult problem. Ultimately, I found a way out of this rather ambiguous situation by employing a sort of dodge: I gave the new work a title. In a way, ‘The time that has passed’ substantiates the current to which I referred while writing this composition. The title and the subtitles of the work’s movements, which sound quite exotic in our day and age (there are as many as nine movements), justify the curious marriage between the somewhat nostalgic past and a present that has not yet been particularly well ‘assimilated’. I hope that these feuilles d’album will discharge their ‘toning’ function well. - Zbigniew Bargielski/ Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes

Jazz classics including: The Birth of the Blues * Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart * I Got Rhythm.

Par ADES THOMAS. Composed in 1994 and now firmly established as part of the contemporary string quartet repertoire, Arcadiana is one of Thomas Adès’s early masterpieces. Six of its seven movements evoke various vanished or vanishing idylls. The odd-numbered movements are all aquatic. I might be the ballad of some lugubrious gondolier; III takes a title and a figuration from a Schubert Lied; in V a ship is seen swirling away to L’Isle Joyeuse; VII is the River of Oblivion. The second and sixth movements inhabit pastoral Arcadias, respectively: Mozart’s ‘Kingdom of Night’, and more local fields. The joker in this pack is the fourth movement, the literal dead centre: Poussin’s tomb bearing the inscription ‘Even in Arcady am I’. / Ensemble Music / Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes