Following on from the sensational opera Edward II, four instruments are now given voice: Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini has composed his first String Quartet for the Quatuor Diotima. The Swiss composer, a genuine dramatist who has concentrated on music theatre and vocal music in his work to date, has conceived his quartet as a musical narrative. He lines up six sections one after another: short intermezzo miniatures for small forces alternate with full-blown main movements, motifs are exposed and later developed: “What is heard in the brief first movement as basic material, a succinct pizzicato gesture, a quarter-tone cantilena and ‘noisy orchestrated’ stillness, reappears in transformed form in the later movements (III and V). What they all have in common is their sostenuto character, a pausing and a listening as well as the concentration on succinct motivic characterisation.” The larger movements execute particular basic characteristics: an acceleration to the maximum display of power and light, then “dream-like textures of a hypnotic melodic sing-song” form, and the last is then rhapsodically open. Scartazzini says about his work: “The tonal language of the quartet encompasses a great harmonic breadth, from filigree major-key sounds to the sharpest dissonance, but without these means seeming polystylistic. The quarter tonality used over wide stretches serves to expand the chromatic spectrum to intensify the expressivity.”

MLM
(translation: Elizabeth Robinson)
(from [t]akte 2/2017)