Quatuor Bozzini is reissuing an album on its own label that gained fame when Björk mentioned it in an interview. It’s String Quartets by Jürg Frey, published by Éditions Wandelweiser in 2006. It is now out of print.

String Quartets presents the Swiss composer’s first two string quartets, including the masterly and almost ghostly Streichquartett 2. For almost half an hour, delicate chords constructed in semitone harmonics and dynamics that rarely exceed triple piano follow one another with highly subtle transformations, creating a disembodied, spectral and vaporous atmosphere. Harmony is blurred to the point where a gradually building consonant framework is perceived rather than heard. Frey is an ascetic of Minimalism.

The first quartet is based on the same structural thinking, though it is more assertive in its gestures and volume of sound. Two miniatures complete the programme, the Zwei allerletze Sächelchen (Two very last things), each lasting no more than a minute. Like musical haikus, they disappear as soon as they are recited, leaving the audience to deepen their understanding long after listening. Since this album, the Bozzinis have premiered other works by Frey, including String Quartet No. 4, which received critical acclaim last year. A monument to austere, stoic minimalism.

Je suis calme et enragé·e (I am calm and angry) by Egyptian-Québécoise Nour Symon is a plunge into strangeness. A musical strangeness carried by an almost noisy score made up of infernal vocalizations and acid sound waves, electronic and acoustic, which support the often intense declamation of expressionist poetic texts by Roxane Desjardins. The result is an existential manifestation of presence in the world, inspired initially by the 2012 Printemps érable in Quebec, the moment of the ‘genesis of the project’, according to Symon. Echoes of Diamanda Galas are perceptible in this demanding and disconcerting work.

Nour Symon is undoubtedly one of the boldest musical voices in contemporary Quebec, one of those who dares to go the furthest. Her creative language is an uncompromising assault on the prevailing conservatism.

It’s the kind of music that sadly drives away the traditional mass media, and makes those like PanM 360 so indispensable.

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.

Amb el suport d’Actuellecd, un recurs inestimable en la música nova i d’avantguarda, que treballa, entre d’altres, amb DAME-Music, un segell discogràfic amb seu a Montréal, Canada.

El disc, que forma part de la Collection QB, recull quatre obres per a quartet de corda de Jurg Frëy.

El llançament de l’àlbum String Quartets commemora el 25è aniversari del Quatuor Bozzini, de manera que el públic pot conèixer una part essencial de la seva eclèctica discografia. Es tracta de la reedició d’un enregistrament llegendari produït originalment per Editions Wandelweiser el 2006.

El compositor suís Jurg Frëy és poc conegut al nostre país. La seva música és lenta, reflexiva, amb cops d’arc llargs realitzats amb un so expressiu que dona coherència a tot el cos de la producció musical de Frëy.

En la peça central, Streichquartett, el quartet fa sonar uns repetitius intervals cromàtics descendents sotmesos a una llarga cadena d’acords lents que generen harmònics; un sol tema, el mig to, que els quatre instruments omplen de sonoritat amb molta lentitud. Són insistents els pizzicatos, intercalats amb notes llargues repetitives.

El segon quartet està precedit per altres obres més breus. El díptic Zwei allerletze Sächelchen —Mailied i Vorbei— crida l’atenció per la seva delicada brevetat. Són moviments sorprenents perquè cadascun d’ells dura escassament un minut. Dues idees, dos instants.

El Quatuor Bozzini ofereix una visió moderada del cromatisme suau i insistent, una construcció harmònica innovada per Morton Feldman en els seus darrers anys.

El Quartet de cordes núm. 2 és més ombrívol i les tècniques interpretatives del Quatuor Bozzini són meticuloses, lúcides i perfeccionistes: cada so és tota una experiència. Són músics amb una gran experiència que transmeten a l’oient una immersió completa en la música de Jurg Frëy.

El seu rigorós ofici, que cerca la qualitat per damunt de tot, els ha convertit en un dels conjunts de cambra de música d’avantguarda més importants de l’actualitat.

Quatuor Bozzini, a string quartet featuring Alissa Cheung, Clemens Merkel, and siblings Stéphanie and Isabelle Bozzini, have been at the forefront of Canada’s new music scene for over two-and-a-half decades, now. Here, they are joined by the junctQín keyboard collective, a somewhat younger but well established and distinguished piano trio — that’s three pianos — consisting of Stephanie Chua, Joseph Ferretti, and Elaine Lau in a series of realizations of composer Rebecca Buton’s Faerie Ribbon and Jason Deoll’s to carry dust & breaks through the body. These and the album title, a root or mirror, blossom, madder, cracks; together, are evocative, but in their opacity and undefined suggestiveness. And maybe that is a fitting way to lead into the review proper. The music is suggestively enigmatic.

Burton’s The Fairie Ribbon consists of four parts of glittery, romantic music that borders on the hymnic. At the same time — and maybe linked to that religious idea of calm, sacred space — it evokes an uneven saunter through a forest pathway with strings enveloping birdsongs just well enough to add an impressionistic mystery. As with any proper forest tale, it plays with light and dark, sometimes seeming more foreboding than carefree. (Leo Orenstein comes to mind in this blend of elements.) Long pauses separate the sections within each part, of which there are four. These mark transitions and escalations, but also mimic the detours and distractions of a light hike, where one stops to view a vista here, or a strange, colorful bird in a tree there, or an odd outcropping one may or may not want to risk exploring. After a quick glance, one returns to their thoughts, meandering along with the hiker’s uncertain path. The listener’s mind and attention is set wandering in a similar fashion, until, in the final part, the piece climaxes in a majestic moment of clarity.

The second half, loosely speaking, of a root or mirror consists of a realization of a composition from Jason Doell. This one is somewhat darker than The Fairie Ribbon and relies on long doubled tones and slow progressions to achieve a sort of grandiosity. Slow melodies waft around a couple central dramatic leitmotifs. The melodies, meticulously excavated from what could otherwise have been a morass of chords, are heavy and plodding, almost menacing in their unison. But the piece shows its real power in the persistence of the drones, the heavy key strikes, the constant loop back to the foundational melody, the anticipation those elements engender. To carry dust is a strong piece, more linear than the itinerant Fairie Ribbon.

In this release, we see two related but diverging faces of the many-sided dice of contemporary composition, inspired by various strands of the postwar new music, but avoiding the stark minimalist or cacophonist extremes. Composers Burton and Deoll are not alone in this pursuit, of course. However, they pursue it with a rare degree of skill and confidence. As do the Bozzini and junctiQin ensembles.