String quartet (P/ST) - difficult

SKU: HL.49033305

Composed by Peteris Vasks. This edition: Saddle stitching. Sheet music. Edition Schott. Score and Parts. Composed 2004. 56 pages. Duration 25'. Schott Music #ED9809. Published by Schott Music (HL.49033305).

ISBN 9790001137911. UPC: 884088408053. 9.0x12.0x0.202 inches.

String Quartet No. 5 consists of two contrasting movements. The first movement, being present, immediately leads to an atmosphere of high emotional tension. The prevailing atmospheric elements of the music are dramatic and passionate, alternating with each other like a kaleidoscope. In contrast to that, a second theme is intoned three times - an invitation, a memory of the existence of another world, a light-house which illuminates the twilight in which we live so often. But this invitation remains unheard. The first movement concludes with dissonances in the upper register - a cry of utter desperation.The second movement, so distant ... yet so near, is the calm, unhurried vocal section of the quartet. A forgiving, loving look at a world tortured by grief and contradictions. Gradually, the singing becomes more personal, more emotional and more dramatic. The rhythmic figure of a funeral march in the recapitulation of the second movement is a gesture of loss. Eventually, the quartet loses itself in an atmosphere of light-filled grief. Peteris Vask.

Arranged by George A. Speckert. GH. Score, Set of parts, anthology. Baerenreiter Verlag #BA10652. Published by Baerenreiter Verlag

String Quartet (Score)

SKU: HL.14023668

Composed by Michael Nyman. Music Sales America. Classical. Score. Composed 1993. 22 pages. Chester Music #CH60865. Published by Chester Music (HL.14023668).

ISBN 9780711932975. 9.0x12.0x0.095 inches.

String Quartet No.3 was written for, and first performed by the Balanescu Quartet, February 1990 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London. Duration 16 minutes. Instrumental parts are available on sale. 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 responses of some 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 Khoren Meykhanejian, 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 less profound experience of witnessing the images of the Romanian revolution on television during the later part of December 1989. The compositional procedure was as follows: to take Out of the Ruins as a template on which the Romanian vocal or instrumental music would be superimposed, quite often stretched into new intervallic shapes though the demands of the completely performed harmonic structure.

Composed by Elena Ruehr. Instrumental part. E.C. Schirmer Publishing #9132. Published by E.C. Schirmer Publishing

String Quartet

SKU: HL.14030964

Composed by Bent Sorensen. Music Sales America. Classical. Score. 10 pages. Music Sales #KP00510. Published by Music Sales (HL.14030964).

ISBN 9788759861455. English.

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 the old 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.

String Quartet

SKU: HL.14008374

Composed by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. Music Sales America. Classical. Score. Composed 2006. 24 pages. Chester Music #CH68629. Published by Chester Music (HL.14008374).

ISBN 9781846096150. UPC: 884088435202. 8.25x11.75x0.105 inches.

The Full Score for Peter Maxwell Davies' fourth in a series of ten string quartets commissioned by the Naxos Recording company, first performed by the Maggini Quartet on 20th August 2004 at the Chapel of the Royal Palace, Oslo, Norway, as part of the Olso Chamber Music Festival. Composer Note: The fourth Naxos quartet was written in January and February of 2004, with the intention of producing something lighter and much less fierce than its predecessor, an unpremeditated and spontaneous reaction to the illegal invasion of Iraq. I returned to the well-known Brueghel picture of children's games (1560, now in Vienna), which had been the inspiration for my sixth Strathclyde Concerto, for flute and orchestra. These illustrations liberated my musical imagination, but I feel it would limit the listener's perception to be too specific about which game relates to exactly which section of the work. Suffice it to say that there is vigorous play - leap-frog, bind the devil with a cord, truss, wrestling - alongside quieter pastimes - masks, guess whom I shall choose, courting, odds and evens. The single movement juxtaposes these activities as abruptly and intimately as they occur in Brueghel. Rather as the eye is taken into different perspectives and proportions of scale within the picture, taking liberties which would never be present in, for instance, Brunelleschi architectural drawings, so here, with a constant sequence of transformation processes, I have distorted the neat, precise implications of modal progression, expressed in the unison opening phrase (from F to B through A sharp/B flat), so that the ear is led, en route, into the sound equivalents of strange passageways and closed rooms: sicut exposition ludus. As work on the quartet progressed I became aware that I was reading into, and behind the games, adult motives and implications, concerning aggression and war, with their consequences. It was impossible to escape into innocent childhood fantasy. The nature of the F to B progression underlying the whole construction derives from a passage in the development of the first movement of Mahler's Third Symphony, and the opening of Schoenberg's Second String Quartet. However, unlike in these models, here a real - if temporary - sense of resolution occurs at the close of the quartet: as when the curtain falls on the reconciled Count and Countess in 'Figaro' one wonders how long the F/B truce will hold, and games break out again. The quartet is dedicated to Giuseppe Rebecchini, Roman architect, and friend since the nineteen-fifties.