Disc Details

Contents

Work Title	Composer
String Quartet no. 10 - Harvest-Timeless	Per Nørgård
String Quartet no. 7	Per Nørgård	Listen
String Quartet no. 8 - Night Descending	Per Nørgård
String Quartet no. 7	Per Nørgård	Listen
String Quartet no. 8 - Night Descending	Per Nørgård
String Quartet no. 10 - Harvest-Timeless	Per Nørgård

Reviews

• Per Nørgård's later quartets have largely arisen through his collaboration with the Kroger quartet, whose committment to the music they perform is reflected in this being their first commercial release almost a decade after their formation.
  Although they may not define his output as the symphonies tend to do, the quartets allow an inside understanding of Nørgård's evolution: if everything else were lost, they would still represent it in essentials. Thus the Sibelius-cum-Hindemith fusion of Quarteto Breve (1952), the more confident manner of Quartetto Brioso (1954-58) - whose 'metamorphosis' technique denotes his teacher Vagn Homboe, and the elliptical expression of Three Miniatures (1959) from the start of Nørgård's most experimental phase. At its opposite end, Dreamscape (1969) graphically depicts temporal and spatial concerns; then Inscape (1969) heralds the deployment of the 'infinity series' as a stabilizing factor over the next decade. In Tintinnabulary (1986), a reemphasis on discontinuity is sunsumed into music of shimmering textual diversity.
  Between this and the next Quartet came the Fifth Symphony- if not the finest then certainly the most significant such work of the past quarter-century, whose inclusiveness has since informed Nørgård's output. Thus the Seventh Quartet (1994- the only one without subtitle) offsets any formal poise with a first movement restive and restless by turns, a slow movement whose fusing of quarter- and micro-tones imparts a Medieval remoteness, and a finale whose glancing irony discharges accumulated tension without in the least resolving. Drawing on the chamber opera Nuit des Hommes, Night Descending Like Smoke (1997) is the most inherently radical of these quartets- from the cumulative intensity of 'Prologue-Eulogy', through the rhythmic aggression of 'Man-Animal' and the textual free-fall of 'Voyage', to the sombreness of 'Night Descending', before 'Epilogue-Elegy' brings about a clinching but hardly affirmative synthesis.
  If Into the Source (2001) persues a more balanced trajectory, that source is hardly a classical one. While each of the three movements could be heard as a formal archetype, a freely developing variation cuts across and neutralizes any linear tendencies: as in the Sixth Century qhich preceded it, the musical content embodiesvarious motion other than moving forward, for all that its clear-cut contrasts belie this. In what might be termed a 'synthesis of syntheses', Harvest-timeless (2005) draws 15 years' exploration into an eventful single span that unfolds with easeful inevitability: a distillation that may serve as a pointer to the recent Seventh Symphony, but then again...
  Music so diverse in its expressive means yet so focussed in stylistic ends requires playing of real conviction to do it justice, and receives this from the Kroger Quartet, whose identification with the Nørgård idiom is central to the impression made by these very different yet equally characteristic works. Wide-ranging sound, along with insightful notes by Jorgen I. jensen, enhances an evidently self-recommending release.
  Richard Whitehouse, International Record Review, 01 October 2008