De samenwerking tussen Quatuor Bozzini en Oesterle duurt al zo’n vijfentwintig jaar. Op Quatuors verzamelde het kwartet Oesterle’s derde en vierde kwartet, uit 2010, respectievelijk 2019; Three Pieces for String Quartet uit 2016 en het oudste stuk op dit album, het uit 2001 stammende Daydream Mechanics. Ook Oesterle kiest er in dit stuk voor om te werken met repetitieve patronen, al is zijn aanpak wel kleurrijker dan die van Johnson. Het derde kwartet kreeg als titel Alan Turing en vormt een eerbetoon aan deze geleerde en zijn creatieve geest. En ook hier weet Oesterle prachtige kleuren aan dit kwartet te ontlokken, zo te horen nogal eens gebruik makend van een onorthodoxe speelwijze. Zo associeer ik de klanken in het prachtige tweede deel niet altijd direct met dat van een strijkkwartet. Zeer overtuigend klinkt ook het bijzonder ritmische derde deel. Het uit één deel bestaande vierde kwartet is wellicht wel het hoogtepunt van dit album. Met zijn geometrische figuren creëert Oesterle hier een bijzonder overtuigende klanksculptuur, uiterst genuanceerd en rijk geschakeerd. En zoals alle stukken op deze twee albums, wordt ook dit kwartet ongelofelijk goed uitgevoerd.

Quatuor Bozzini has energetically championed the newest in classical music since 1999 in their Montréal hometown, on tour and on outstanding albums. Their mission is to cultivate risk-taking music, evident in the creation of an impressive commissioning program of over 400 pieces. Frequent collaborations with other musicians and cross-disciplinary projects have been another career feature. An example of an unusual collaboration, one that I took part in, happened in 2012 with the development of new concert repertoire with Toronto’s Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan, performed live and subsequently released on the album Higgs’ Ocean. The title track, scored for string quartet and gamelan degung, was by prolific mid-career Canadian composer Michael Oesterle.

Oesterle’s mature compositional style balances two late-20th — and early-21st-century streams: American minimalism and European postmodernism. The latter comes through in his exploitation of sonorities, formal, timbral and harmonic sophistication, allusions to historical Euro musics and an identifiable Oesterlean lyricism. This album’s four substantial string quartets offer an appealing balance between musical straightforwardness and complexity. Oesterle often generates drama from the friction between the idiomatic and the completely unexpected.

Daydream Mechanics (2001), which evokes the “awkward adventures of childhood when the backyard seemed as full of disturbing possibilities as any uncharted territory,” offers an example of Oesterle’s use of extra-musical inspiration. On the other hand the composer describes his Three Pieces for String Quartet as “three short pieces [composed with] modules drawn from a system of triangular numerical sequences….” I however hear surprisingly Renaissance — and Baroque — infused character homages to the three animals Oesterle titles each movement after: kingfisher, orangutan and orb weaver.

Quator Bozzini is Clemens Merkel (violin), Alissa Cheung (violin), Stéphanie Bozzini (viola) and Isabelle Bozzini (cello). For two decades, this Canadian Quartet has been in business and working continuously from a strong idealistic mission, specialising in realizing contemporary and experimental music projects. Many projects featured works from composers from the Montréal-area and other parts of the world. This time they concentrate on works by Michael Oesterle, a German-born composer who lives and works in Québec. He did his studies at the University of British Columbia and Princeton University in the US. He composes for the concert hall as well as theatre, film and dance productions. His compositions have been performed by outstanding ensembles like Ensemble Intercontemporain (Paris), and Tafelmusik (Toronto). Quator Bozzini is one of the ensembles Oesterle has worked for already for a long time. The quartet debuted in 2004 with ‘Portrait Montréal’ with works by Claude Vivier, Malcolm Goldstein, Jean Lesage and one by Michael Oesterle: Daydream Mechanics V (2001). This composition is included again on this new release by the quartet with three other more recent compositions by Oesterle. The composition Daydream Mechanics V is also recorded recently by the ensemble Music in the Barns for their release for New Focus Recordings, beautiful, elegant work. The compositions on this new release by Quator Bozzini introduce Oesterle as a composer of accessible compositions of a minimalistic nature. The cd opens with String Quartet No. 4, his most recent composition and maybe the most complex one on this recording. A work built up from different episodes, some of them very melodic with a catchy theme contrasted with more rigorous parts. Like the opening part, very dynamic, contrasted with a very soft and reduced experimental section. Three Pieces for String Quartet ( 2016) has a pastoral atmosphere, with lively and accentuated gestures by the players. In the second part, the music touches on the motives of early classical music. String Quartet No. 3 “Alan Turing” (2010) is likewise an evocative work full of gentle and subtle movements, using a very close theme to the one used in the opening work. Interesting works delivered in an inspired performance!

Quatuor Bozzini’s set of Michael Oesterle’s Quatuors opens with a nice comfy chorale that almost immediately drops away to a near-inaudible skein of harmonics. This piece, Oesterle’s String Quartet No. 4, is the latest and longest of the four pieces heard here (but not the entirety of his output for string quartet). The piece moves casually back and forth between slow pulses of alternating chords and scurrying patterns of harmonics, before returning to chorales and whispers. Oesterle gives no programme other than to assert that his musical materials are always “geometric, expressive, and puritanical”. It is the most subtly disorienting piece in the collection, as each passage yields to the next without any formal structural division, while beguiling sounds are tempered by a secretiveness as to where, if anywhere, the music may be directed. Quatuor Bozzini’s style of playing ideally evokes that shrouded expressivity, never loud but each phrase always indelible, however softly it is played.

The remaining three pieces are more easily apprehended, each falling into neatly digestible sections. String Quartet No. 3 “Alan Turing” from 2010 explores patterns, gestures and textures with an appropriate sense of wonder and discovery mingled with loss and regret. The Bozzinis bring out the gentle playfulness of each movement, slightly darkened by the melancholy of its subject. The harmonic language and gestures at times recall the freshness of a previous generation’s “post-minimal” tonality in its first flowering, before it was worked in harness to the service of Hollywood soundtracks. The titles of 2016’s Three Pieces for String Quartet evoke various animals but Oesterle’s notes again cite geometrical puzzles as each piece’s prime mover, claiming inspiration from Stravinsky and Cage. I can hear a kinship with Ruth Crawford in here, which is the highest of praise. The earliest piece here, Daydream Mechanics from 2001, is the most extended and hushed movement in the collection, with genuine whispering, searching out unexpected consequences from an otherwise confined grid of chordal patterns. Quatuor Bozzini’s championing of this composer, matching his language with a refinement of style that moves from rapid filigree to near-stillness in the same mode of emotion, reveals depths slowly swirling below the undemanding surface.