recorded at La Muse en Circuit, Paris, December 5 & 6, 2016
Recorded and mixed by Camille Lézer
Mastered by Rashad Becker
Cover Photo: Sandro Zanzinger
Artwork: Joanna John
THE MUSIC
Reinhold Friedl’s string quartets do not pretend to be string quartets: they are anti-Goethe. There is no sophisticated conversation of four elder gentlemen, sitting in arm chairs. The music is physical work for the performers and intended to be physical pleasure for the listeners. All three quartets are based on the same idea: smooth transformations from a given texture into another one. The random-driven details vary between the pieces and the parts of the pieces. Meanwhile Reinhold Friedl developed a software in the frame of a PHD project at Goldsmiths University London to help him modeling these texture transpositions.
STRING QUARTET NO 1 (2005 dedicated to Anton Lukoszevieze, commissioned by BBC London) is focused on a ghostly sound choreography, made possible by a strange choreography: instruments are only bowed in circles. These simple movements combined in an asymmetric rhythmical structure causes complex soundscapes, that tend to develop to a certain final state, and they do, driven by a hypnotic force.
STRING QUARTET NO 3 (2016, dedicated to Pierre Morlet, commissioned by G((o))ng Tomorrow Copenhagen) can be listened to as a reference to some modern string quartet sound. Famous chords and melodies are quoted and hidden in their pure quantity. Sweet sugar music. An essay how to compose a decrescendo without a culmination point. Slowly and precisely slip away, ending nowhere.
STRING QUARTET NO 2 (2009 for Quatuor Diotima, commissioned by the French State for the Festival Les Musiques in Marseille, France) is written for Quatuor Diotima as a sportive piece. After a charming beginning, it becomes more and more a physical challenge for the performers, playing tremolo almost without break, to get the music to the final grooving rhythmical end: get out of my face !
Étant anti-Goethe, les quatuors à corde de Reinhold Friedl ne prétendent pas être ....... więcej