HELMUT LACHENMANN (b.1935): Complete String Quartets - Gran Torso, Reigen seliger Geister, Grido.

Catalogue Number: 04P080

Label: Mode

Reference: 267

Format: CD

Price: $17.98

Description: Gran Torso, its title suggesting something whole yet part of an as yet incomplete project, was written in 1971-72, and very much represents the experimentalist composer not only redefining the sonics of the string quartet, but insisting on a larger redefinition of what sounds are acceptable in music in his instrumental musique concrète. The entire piece is made up of extended sounds, often subtle rather than aggressively 'noisy' (a large part of the work is in the very threshold of silence) - any and every means of producing sounds from string instruments other than conventional bow-on-string playing. Having liberated this new vocabulary, Lachenmann readmitted some degree of convention in the following two quartets - meaning that there are some actual notes played - providing a greater sense of continuity or narrative (which was, paradoxically, far from absent even in Gran Torso). Much of the second quartet is played in a whisper-textured 'pressureless flautando' in iridescent, insubstantial flickering colors. The third uses the experimental sounds to decorate, or illuminate, an immensely slow progression of notes or chords and some active music that almost hints at a conventional presto scherzando movement, lending solidity and structure to the work's unpredictable progression. Despite its subtitle, the work does not 'scream', by the way; the word is an acronym assembled from the initials of the then members of the Arditti quartet, who premiered the piece in 2001. The JACK Quartet.

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