PASCAL DUSAPIN (b.1955): String Quartet No. 6 for String Quartet and Orchestra “Hinterland”, String Quartet No. 7 “Open Time”. Arditti Quartet, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France; Pascal Rophé.

Description: Dusapin has returned frequently to the quartet, to stimulating and varied effect, within his large corpus of works, and these substantial works - the 7th is almost 40 minutes - are no exception. Hinterland is described as a 'hapax' - the sole instance of something within a body of work - this refers to the fact that the work is for orchestra with the quartet functioning as a kind of composite soloist. Dusapin's music is always readily accessible, and this piece is especially so, the limited pitch material of the composer's trademark octatonic harmony lending a clean, free-floating tonal feel to the busy, propulsive textures. The quartet is integrated into the ensemble, playing more elaborated material and sometimes emerging into a soloistic spotlight. Open Time is based on very small gestures, an anacrusis (out of the meter of the music, hence one meaning of the title) and a couple of intervals. Once the piece gets going it shares the propulsive motion of Hinterland in a sequence of 21 'variations' which again explore the limited pitch set, avoiding pronounced dissonance but with the added inflections of quarter-tone variations to the consonant intervals.