String Quartet No. 4 is the third string quartet Frey composed for Canadian, Montréal-based contemporary ensemble Quatuor Bozzini (first violinist Alissa Cheung, second violinist Clemens Merkel, violist Stéphanie Bozzini and cellist Isabelle Bozzini) over twent years of collaboration (the first one, String Quartets, was recorded in 2004, Edition Wandelweiser Records, 2006). This 65-minute, five-movement composition was written between 2018 and 2020 (and completed before Frey composed Les signes passagers). It was first premiered — virtually — at the MaerzMusikl Festival in Berlin in March 2021 and performed live for the first time at the Only Connect Festival in Oslo in April 2022 and refined during the recording with Quatuor Bozzini in Montréal in May 2023.
Frey describes this composition as “slow, sometimes static, often delicately shifting between standstill and movement. And yet, after more than an hour, this music has arrived at another place. Standstill, little happens, — it is this atmosphere from which my music emerges and to which it always returns. Sometimes it just stays there. This is my world”.
String Quartet No. 4 is a calm and beautiful composition that radiates a rare sense of poetic weightlessness in search of silence in sound, with a profound emotional effect. It is developed slowly, with minimalist and slow shifts and almost transparent dissonances, always hinting about its deeper, secret wonders, evoking a musical garden that asks you to appreciate its delicate, changing colors as they blossom in their own accord. And, like all Frey’s compositions, it is performed masterfully by Quatuor Bozzini with precise sensitivity for color, sound and silence in Frey’s aesthetics.
