Chamber Music String
Quartet
SKU:
PR.114414250
Composed
by Lowell Liebermann.
Contemporary. Set of
Score and Parts. With
Standard Notation. Op.
103. 28+9+8+9+8 pages.
Duration 25 minutes.
Theodore Presser Company
#114-41425. Published by
Theodore Presser Company
(PR.114414250).
UPC:
680160607846.
Lowel
l Liebermann's 4th String
Quartet was commissioned
by the Canandaigua Lake
Chamber Music Festival
and the Wood Library,
Canandaigua, NY, for the
Orion Quartet in
celebration of their 20th
Anniversary. The quartet
was premiered by the
Orions at the Canandaigua
Lake Chamber Music
Festival in Rochester, NY
on February 9th, 2008. To
quote the writer Mark
Greenberg: It's a
remarkable piece. The
mood is elegiacal and
meditative, the melodic
lines sinuous and
searching, the harmonies
rich and astonishingly
beautiful. Liebermann
works within the
traditions of Western
tonality, but that is a
mansion with many rooms.
Liebermann inhabits all
of them as his expressive
purposes require, and he
doesn't mind knocking
down a wall to create new
harmonic spaces. The
Fourth Quartet doesn't
exactly fit the
neoromantic niche into
which Liebermann is
sometimes placed. Much of
the music, especially
near the beginning, is a
highly advanced and fluid
chromatic expressionism
with modernist
tendencies. Sometimes
this roiling cloudscape
breaks open to allow a
patch of near-classical
harmony and
almost-resolution. Near
the midpoint the clouds
lift in leaping
modulations. Several
chordal passages recall
Russian Orthodox chant.
Suddenly, when you've
begun to think the
somber, deliberate pace
has gone on a bit too
long, Liebermann
introduces a kind of
hobbled, stilted jazz
idiom. The piece dies in
pensive quiet.
GREEN LINE
