Cuarteto Quiroga - Statements: Haydn, Webern, Sollima (2019) [Hi-Res]

Why does a composer write a string quartet? Why does he choose a specific key? What lies behind the decision to use certain forms or structures? Are there any hidden meanings – between notes, chords, cadences – which go beyond the strictly musical content? Can music be a Statement of anything else than music?

This album suggests that the answer might be yes, that there is something beyond the strictly musical, that there are certain works whose aesthetic message trascends its sonic material, that writing music is, or should be, a Statement whose rhetorical content is forged among keys, motives, chords, beautiful shapes and achievements, albeit surpassing them all. And, most specifically, that string quartet music is – and has been since quartet exists as a genre –, a Statement in which composers reveal their craftmanship and inspiration: they commit themselves to take action and thus produce a sort of aesthetic manifesto.

We conceive of the works that we have chosen for this CD as references and paradigmatic examples of musical statements. By setting them all together, we intend to make, in a parallel manner, a more personal Statement as a string quartet.

Joseph Haydn wrote his six string quartets Op. 20 deploying all his masterhood as a composer. He envisaged these works not only as an answer to all those who dared to question his craftmanship and artistry, but also as a way of facing the challenges of a new style and an even newer musical aesthetics. These works are therefore the brave and nonconformist Statement of a composer who was about to establish forms and genres who would eventually become guide and reference of all the modern musical tradition inherited from the Enlightment. In fact, the Op. 20, No. 2, written in the key of light (C Major) is one of the most brilliant examples of the rise of a new musical style, which not only does not neglect the heritage of counterpoint, but flirts “capricciously” with opera, the folk music of central European traditions and the galant style. When one listens to this music it is hard to avoid thinking that Haydn must have been a great fellow. Humour, drama, craftmanship, irony, lyricism, simplicity and boldness. This music was born looking far ahead of its time.

Years later, Anton von Webern would have to face, as a young composer, a system and a tradition about to collapse. His Langsamer Satz is undoubtedly a Statement of a young composer who is trying to find his own expressive voice within the frame of a language which, tested to its limits, is on the verge of a breakdown. In this work, Webern seems to state, with moving strength and honesty, that the future of the expressivity which he had inherited from his musical predecessors was teetering on the edge of a bewitching abyss where only the vertigo of time awaits. With such a vision, in this CD, Webern plays the role of a pivoting hinge, of a fundamental keystone to understand a musical arch that had started with Haydn. Because it was Webern who managed to create one of the strongest musical declarations in the whole string quartet repertoire. His Five Movements Op. 5 are a clear aesthetic Statement which, departing from the culture of composition that he had inherited from the classics, present music with a new and unknown expressive power. These five small jewels are monuments of overwhelming beauty. Here, music is face to face against silence, drawing a poetic line which is at once humble and radical, terrifying and gorgeous. This is a work that led to a period full of fantastic musical creations, and has remained an unmissable reference for all avantgarde composers.

Finally, Giovanni Sollima closes this album with a work written in 2008, which undoubtedly is another interesting and powerful Statement. One of a newer generation which cannot escape the omnipresent mediatic influence of popular music and which flirts in a brilliant, instinctive and irreverent eclecticism with different traditions: from various folkish patterns of European cultures to minimalism and cinema.

By synchronising this four musical Statements together, as if a diachronic 4-part musical conversation was being held, perhaps we are trying to outline our own and intimate Statement about our idea of what a String Quartet is. Rather than a genre or an ensemble, a string quartet seems to claim to be – in these compositions and through all music history – the ideological laboratory of Modernity’s musical aesthetics, where the audacious and undaunted experiments that put into conflict and conversation form and content, open a dialectics of magical spaces which propose a poetry both intimate and universal.

And in this Statement of love for string quartet as the art of challenge and shelter of the most nonconformist instrumental praxis, we humbly want to pay homage to the precious legacy that was handed to us from our dear teachers, who shared a concept of String Quartet that went beyond music, understanding it as an outstanding cultural phenomenon: laboratory of a diverse society, testimony of our European culture, challenge for our future ways.

A Statement of gratitude, but most importantly, one of commitment.