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3 String Quartets

Christian Wolff

Cover art: Tristram Wolff

CD

This item can be downloaded and/or listened to at actuellecd.com.

  • Label: New World Records
  • NWR 80830
  • 2021
  • UCC 093228083023
  • Total duration: 75:11
  • Jewel case
  • 125 mm × 142 mm × 10 mm
  • 90 g

On the web

Reviews

The Best Contemporary Classical of 2021

Peter Margasak, Bandcamp Daily, December 23, 2021

Christian Wolff’s String Quartet Exercises out of Songs, composed between 1974-76, is a series of three movements built around protest songs, including tunes from Communist China, a Hans Eisler revolutionary anthem, and Florence Reece’s Which Side Are You On? from the American labor movement. Each segment departs from the opening theme in different ways, but in all of them the music veers to and from abstraction, and the ensemble members push and pull in a way that summons the ideas in the second string quartet of Charles Ives, in which an argument and resolution among the players is captured in sound.

Apart from the five-minute For E.C. in 2003, It would be another three decades before Wolff wrote for the chamber format again, when Montréal’s Quatuor Bozzini commissioned a piece in 2008. He developed that composition from ideas for a violin-cello duo he’d already been toying with—it partly explains the witty, recalcitrant title, For 2 violinists, violist, and cellist. The work explores different instrumental combinations and techniques, with plenty of decisions made by the musicians — a specialty of Bozzini, and a key reason why they developed a strong connection to Wolff, who also wrote his Out of Kilter for them in 2019. That nine-movement work is more compact but no less diverse in its components than the previous commission, leapfrogging between a chipper scherzo, minimalism, folk-based sources, microtonality, and beyond.

The work explores different instrumental combinations and techniques, with plenty of decisions made by the musicians — a specialty of Bozzini, and a key reason why they developed a strong connection to Wolff, who also wrote his Out of Kilter for them in 2019.

Review

Christian Carey, Sequenza 21, December 22, 2021

Wolff’s String Quartet Exercises out of Songs (1974-76) is another covert quodlibet, one in which Wolff’s music takes on an Ivesian cast, both in terms of some of the material and the collage aspects of the form. Once again, rapid stops and starts deliberately disrupt the flow. These juxtapositions are performed spotlessly by the estimable Quatuor Bozzini. Cast in a single movement, For 2 violinists, violist and cellist (2008), as the title suggests, breaks the string quartet mold, allowing each player their own space and a degree of agency. This goes hand in hand with the egalitarian sensibility that Wolff has espoused both in his writings and music, always viewing new works with an eye toward collaboration. For 2 violinists, violist and cellist ups the dissonance quotient but retains a highly gestural rhythmic language. Its one attacca movement, clocking in at over a half hour, is a compelling retort to large-scale late modernism. Out of Kilter (String Quartet 5) was written in 2019, and contrasts the previous piece in terms of design. Cast in a series of short movements, the demeanor now shifts within movements and between movements, capturing a plethora of moods, tempos, and solo, duo, and ensemble deployments. Wolff is nearing ninety years of age, yet he still has more tricks up his sleeve.

These juxtapositions are performed spotlessly by the estimable Quatuor Bozzini.

Review

Michael Rosenstein, Point of Departure, December 1, 2021

It’s remarkable to realize that Christian Wolff has been creating music for over seven decades. Even more remarkable when one thinks about the range of his work. One could focus on graphic scores or text pieces like Burdocks, Edges, or Stones, his catalog of solo piano music, his music for open ensemble configurations like his Exercises series, or his activities as a performer of improvised music with musicians including Keith Rowe, Eddie Prévost, Michael Pisaro-Liu, and Antoine Beuger. And that just skirts the edges of his massive output of 250 compositions, starting in 1950 and still going strong. Wolff has benefited greatly from ongoing relationships with musicians who have performed his music regularly such as Eberhard Blum, Roland Dahinden, Philip Thomas, Robyn Schulkowsky, John Tilbury, Apartment House, as well as composers like Gordon Mumma and Frederic Rzewski.

Yet somehow, his string quartets have never quite gotten much attention. A few have appeared on previous releases, but it is remarkable that this recording by Montréal-based Quatuor Bozzini offers premiers of pieces Wolff composed in the mid-1970s, 2008, and 2019. The quartet have performed the pieces regularly for the past two decades and, in the case of the latter two compositions, the pieces were premiered by them. In his incisive liner notes, Pisaro-Liu notes that “his quartet music stems as much from Ives and Cage as from the European art music tradition. The four characters of Ives become four people playing music. In one piece he simply calls them ‘2 violinists, violist and cellist.’ Sometimes they are asked to coordinate like a traditional quartet. But at other times (often in the same piece), they are pushed to the point of dissolution. Here we find a music that allows for the spontaneous expression of four musicians who are bound together by something more than the rule of the bar line.” The three string quartets presented on this release embody these threads, embracing lyricism, political themes, open collective strategies for ensemble interaction, and compositional abstraction.

The set starts out with the three-part String Quartet Exercises out of Songs written between 1974 and 1976, a time when Wolff was grappling with how to make explicit connections between his political and social activism and his music. Like Frederic Rzewski, Wolff incorporated protest and political songs into his compositions. For the first Exercise, he drew on “Workers and Peasants are One Family,” which is a Communist adaptation of a Chinese folksong. The simple theme is stated and then gets increasingly refracted as phrases are pulled apart, broken by irregular rests which the quartet navigates with an assured sense of pacing. The way that the lyrical theme is teased apart is a study in harmonic deconstruction. The second is based on the revolutionary anthem Comintern Song by Hanns Eisler. The piece opens with a voicing of the combative theme which is then pared into a complexly structured counterpoint threaded across the ensemble. The third uses Which Side Are You On?, a song for union solidarity also used by Rzewski as the basis for a stirring piece for solo piano. Rather than starting with the theme like the previous two pieces, this one opens with a stately melodic section with ideas that move seamlessly across the instruments. A third of the way through, the theme surfaces and then gets subsumed as the piece moves further and further into fragmentation. Two thirds of the way through, the theme surfaces again, setting the stage for a languid violin solo which wends toward a rousing conclusion and restatement of the theme.

For 2 violinists, violist, and cellist, composed a decade later began as a duo for violin and cello and became a string quartet written for Quatuor Bozzini. Over the course of 34 minutes, the composition breaks down the ensemble into various configurations. The open-form structure calls on the musicians to work both independently and as a unit to navigate the piece. Wolff is quoted as saying “I prefer possible disruption and inconsequence, not so much out of affection for disorder but as a way of looking for other forms of order, fluid and flexible ones, in which the performers and the performance are what matter most, that is, what actually is done and happens can be surprising, while the players find a confidence in acting under partially indeterminate conditions.” Half-way through, a section of extended string techniques fractures into free phrases that hover with keen collective acumen. That collective triangulation across indeterminacy and structure requires both individual conviction and unwavering collective resolve. It is striking the way that all of the members of the group ride that balance throughout this knotty piece.

The nine-part Out of Kilter (String Quartet 5) from 2019 concludes the CD. Across these miniatures, ranging from 30 seconds to 3 minutes long, the quartet embraces Wolff’s penchant for bringing together divergent approaches from folk-like melodicism to microtonality to sustained harmonics and resultant overtones to ragged pizzicato, all coming together to create a variegated whole. Despite Wolff’s wry title for the piece there is nothing that is out of whack with either the overall structure of the composition or the realization captured here. Delivering a cogent performance of the piece requires a group comfortable in drawing on the vast tradition of string quartet writing without being hobbled by the conventions of that tradition. The four musicians move from section to section with a collective poise, digging into the textures, dissonances, and atmospherics of the piece to deliver an enthralling performance. At 87, Christian Wolff is showing few signs of slowing down. It’s great to have groups like Quatuor Bozzini and labels like New World Records devoted to making his music available.

The four musicians move from section to section with a collective poise, digging into the textures, dissonances, and atmospherics of the piece to deliver an enthralling performance.