{"id":13014,"date":"2013-06-11T06:55:52","date_gmt":"2013-06-11T11:55:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/?p=13014"},"modified":"2013-06-11T06:55:52","modified_gmt":"2013-06-11T11:55:52","slug":"album-review-molinari-quartet-brings-out-intimate-power-of-r-murray-schafer-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/2013\/06\/11\/album-review-molinari-quartet-brings-out-intimate-power-of-r-murray-schafer-works\/","title":{"rendered":"Album review: Molinari Quartet brings out intimate power of R. Murray Schafer works"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"molinari\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The world loves grand gestures — big opera, loud rock concerts, tall-and-taller buildings. But those who meditate on happiness inevitably turn to the small, everyday gesture for sustenance — a smile, a pathside wildflower, a gentle nose-prod from the family dog. I want to add the string quartet to the latter list.<\/p>\n

And I also want to suggest that there may be nothing finer in Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer’s output than his string quartets. In writing for two violins, a viola and a cello, he turns his back on the grand gestures of his symphonic and quasi-operatic work, focusing on telling stories in music using the most economical means possible.<\/p>\n

These are stories and depictions, in a very old-fashioned sense. But fashioned in Schafer’s own language, which isn’t ideologically tonal or atonal. It, like Being, Is.<\/p>\n

\"schafer\"<\/a>An excellent new ATMA-released 2-CD recording of Schafer’s five most recent string quartets — Nos. 8 through 12 — by Montreal’s Molinari Quartet<\/a> is so well done that it encourages the listener to play each piece over and over again to savour the composer’s craft and the musicians’ skill in rendering it as fine music.<\/p>\n

(Note that the recording of String Quartet No. 8<\/em> is from 2002; the others are new.)<\/p>\n

Schafer tends to request traditional bowing and plucking, with the occasional tap of the strings from the wooden side of the bow, or a rap of knuckles on an instrument’s body.<\/p>\n

Quartet No. 9<\/em> — my favourite — includes a recorded treble voice singing a five-note theme born in Quartet No. 8<\/em>. It also includes the sounds of children laughing and playing, as if from a schoolyard at recess.<\/p>\n

This brings up one more thing that makes this music interesting — compelling, even: the coexistence of light and dark.<\/p>\n

If you’ve never done this before, on your next walk through a pre-Modern gallery at the AGO look at the landscapes and still lifes and portraits and note how some painters build their work on light. Others rely on shadow.<\/p>\n

The great composers do the same.<\/p>\n

Is Schafer about light or is he about the darker recesses of existence? The answer is most ambiguous in Quartet No. 9<\/em>, but that ambiguity (or duality) informs all of the music on the disc, and the Molinaris navigate it with such elegance.<\/p>\n

Here is the composer himself reading the text that goes along with String Quartet No. 10<\/em> in the promotional video made during the recording session in Mirabel, Qu\u00e9.:<\/p>\n