String Quartet No. 4

SKU: PR.114414250

UPC: 680160607846.

Lowell 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.