The instruments and sounds that seem at first to not fit into the Wandelweiser world come from strings—a bowed note held continuously until the musician can no longer perform the stroke. Yet Frey has written marvelous string quartet music that contrasts the inherent delicacy of silence with careful, concentrated string playing. The great Bozzini Quartet has recorded all of his string quartet pieces so far, this colorful, fiercely quiet performance being the most recent.

The connection between Swiss composer Jürg Frey and the Montréal string ensemble Quatuor Bozzini keeps strengthening, as each party gains additional intimacy, introspection, and intuition for the other. There’s always the danger that such familiarity could breed laziness, and while the fourth string quartet by the composer might not feel as radical or daring as its predecessors, the rigor, beauty, and thoughtfulness have not become victims of the strengthening relationship. Bozzini have a way of articulating the composer’s most fragile passages with unerring sensitivity and lyric fragility, imbuing Frey’s darkly luminescent harmonies and sorrowful progressions with a lightness of touch that doesn’t preclude a sumptuous viscosity and grain, sound morphing with seamless ease, colors swirling and swelling.

The collaboration between Frey and Quatuor Bozzini is close. Violinist Clemens Merkel and Frey have known each other since 1990. Furthermore, the quartet previously premiered the second string quartet from the late 1990s and recorded the first three quartets for Ediotion Wandelweiser. With this five-movement fourth quartet, the collaboration went a step further, Frey explicitly involving the string quartet in the process of composing. The first movement is very slow, but also very even, with the sounds coinciding remarkably. Also special are the subtle but very exciting string movements in this first movement. The second movement stands out in particular for its repetitive pattern, sounding pretty much like a siren, while the third movement, which begins quite brightly, stands out for its melodic content, something we don’t often encounter with Frey. Following this, the fourth movement again sounds broodingly exciting, with its hushed string movements. Finally, we hear the impressive fifth movement, which at over 30 minutes is about as long as the first four movements. Beautiful, quite similar patterns, like a quietly flowing river.

About his String Quartet No. 4 (2021), Swiss composer Jürg Frey (b. 1953) laconically observed, “ My music is slow, sometimes static, often delicately shifting between standstill and movement. And yet, after more than an hour, this music has arrived at another place.” Music critic Alex Ross aptly compared Frey’s music to a “Mahler Adagio suspended in zero gravity.”

One of Canada’s leading string quartets, Bozzini specializes in contemporary music with an impressive 36 releases to date. Fostering a long and deep working relationship with Frey, their premiere recording of his sprawling five-movement Quartet No. 4 is a remarkably poised musical testament to their collaboration. Beginning with whisps of sound the Bozzini morphs into a virtual, though still totally acoustic, orchestra. From pianissimo sustained string chords ghostly instrumental resemblances emerge; they sound like a French horn, harmonica, woodwinds, bandoneon and a soft pipe organ in succession. In Frey’s expansive soundscapes, timbral colour takes centre stage in the sonic field.

“… little happens — it is this atmosphere from which my music emerges and to which it always returns,” explains the composer.

Listeners can choose to lay back and relax in Frey’s sound world observing the timbral transformations, the attractive chord and shifting mood changes. But then — just as we were enjoying the slowly scuttling clouds on a sunny Swiss summer day — those mysterious insistent pulsed cello pizzicati at the very end emerge to remind us of … what? … the passage of time?

Swiss composer Jürg Frey — who turned 70 last year — has had a long association with the Montréal-based new-music specialists, the Bozzini Quartet, writing three quartets for it across a span of 20 years. That closeness and mutual understanding is more than evident in the Bozzini’s sensitive, thoughtful account of his hour-long, five-movement Fourth Quartet from 2020.

It’s a remarkable piece: sparse, reflective, often just a step away from silence, and sounding as though classical gestures have been boiled down to their bare bones, ready for close inspection and contemplation. The Bozzini treads an expert path between almost mechanistic consistency across Frey’s sometimes barely changing musical ideas, while playing up subtle distinctions of light and shade, consonance and dissonance. Indeed, Frey makes more than a few nods to traditional quartet writing in the piece — for example in the second movement’s folk-like drones and ornamentations, and its rich minor-mode triads, which sound shocking after so much dissonance and so many unconventional sounds. The Bozzini embraces the breadth of Frey’s language with such conviction — and, it has to be said, such stamina and sustained intensity across his lengthy paragraphs — that the results are never less than persuasive.

It’s a work that repays close listening and reflection, and Frey could hardly have hoped for a performance of greater insight.