TOSHIO HOSOKAWA (b.1955): Works for String Quartet - Silent Flowers, Landscape I, Urbilder, Blossoming, Landscape V for Shô and String Quartet (Mayumi Miyata [sho]).

Description: Hosokawa's string quartet writing shares characteristics with traditional Japanese calligraphy, an analogy that the composer himself has used. Bold strokes stand out from gently rustling noise textures and sounds produced by extended playing techniques, as subtle a background as the texture of blank paper. The Landscape series evoke a different kind of foreground and background; solid against haze and light, or illuminated against shadowed. Landscape V adds the dense clusters of the Shô to the quartet, inspired by the ambiguous lighting of a Finnish sky-scape and color field paintings of Mark Rothko. Quatuor Diotima. SACD hybrid.