On Disc >

Jürg Frey: String Quartets
(EWR 0410, 2006)

Description

“Material can be anonymous. Consider, for example, the middle voices in medieval hymn books: unadorned, not artful, a simple handiwork, a leisurely alternation of single notes. It might be a scale, or, beyond music, the stones of a wall, not artfully stacked, but simply and properly, the formal idea being nothing other than that of a wall.

When I was working on the String Quartet (1988), I encountered the painting of Agnes Martin. I saw clear-cut forms, not overgrown with rhetoric and figuration. Instead, sensuality, radiance and intensity gripped the entire space.

There was a kind of visibility to her art, which I felt corresponded to the audibility in my music. Audibility: the moment when sound waves move in space and the air touches the body. The eardrum is the sensory connection between the outside and the inside world: we hear the sound and the composition.

Over the years it became more and more clear to me, that there is no anonymous material - each material has its shape, and as soon as it exists in space and time, it carries a distinct handwriting. Anonymous material is rather an idea that brings the work to a point where concentration on what is essential becomes possible, and allows one to feel that he is starting from zero.” —Jürg Frey (English Translation: Michael Pisaro)

Track Listing

Reviews

“… this album is achingly beautiful and is dripping with the intensity and sensuality created by a group of musicians playing difficult music with great passion…”

Richard Pinnell Blog (UK), August 2007

“This otherworldly quartet conjures the a cappella passages of Verdi’s Requiem.”

La Folia (USA), December 2006

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