Rosamunde Quartett, The Hilliard Ensemble - Boris Yoffe: Song of Songs (2011)

Russian-born Israeli composer Boris Yoffe, who developed his career in Germany, established the discipline of writing about a minute of music for string quartet almost every day. On his website he summarizes responses the quartet fragments have elicited from listeners: "The pieces are perceived quite differently by different listeners: 'boring exercises,' 'Each piece is a miracle,' 'abstract,' 'warm and passionate,' 'depressive and dark'... Some say the pieces resemble each other too closely. Others are as fascinated by the similarity’s revelation of a vivid presence of eternity as I am myself." That pretty well sums up the kinds of reactions the music inspires; it's like a Rorschach test onto which the listener could project any number of meanings. The five pieces presented on this recording, some of which add a mens' vocal quartet to the string quartet, are made up by conjoining a number of the brief sketches, and the results do in fact resemble each other pretty closely. The majority of them are spare and melancholy, written within a narrow dynamic range without much use of extremes of register, the sections joined without apparent concern for developmental continuity; this is not music likely to appeal to listeners for whom expressive and timbral range and variety have high value. Its depressed emotional affect could make it seem to fit into the realm of some Eastern European mystical minimalists but its enervation and lack of apparent inner momentum keep it from being properly categorized with those composers. Its impact is ultimately meandering, undisciplined, shapeless. The Hilliard Ensemble and Rosamunde Quartett are top-notch ensembles but they fail to make a case for the music. ECM's sound is characteristically immaculate and warm.