Arditti Quartet: Pandora's Box

This outstanding disc of contemporary works, performed live by the Arditti Quartet, is one of blazing beauty and invention...[Pandora's Box] is at once operatic, darkly beautiful and surprisingly... — BBC Music Magazine, Awards Issue 2015, 5 out of 5 stars More…

Release Date: 4th Aug 2014
Catalogue No: COL20421
Label: Col Legno
Length: 59 minutes

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Saunders, R: Fletch

Work length14:41

Arditti Quartet

Mason, B: String Quartet No. 2

Work length21:29

Arditti Quartet

I -A fast, scherzo-like mechanism of terraced accelerandos

Track length3:52

II - Quiet heterophony - col legno, vertical spiccato

Track length4:11

III - Alla chitarra

Track length3:02

IV - Al tamburo

Track length3:17

V - Static harmony with microtonal inflexions

Track length3:21

VI - A second scherzo, with changing metre

Track length3:46

Bedford, L: Wonderful Four-Headed Nightingale

Work length8:43

Arditti Quartet

Zorn: Pandora's Box

Work length15:00

Sarah Maria Sun, Arditti Quartet

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“These four must be stopped…,” Paul Griffiths wrote more than twenty five years ago about the, even back then, widely praised Arditti Quartet, referring to these excellent musicians’ gift for making wonderful music irrespective of the quality of the actual composition. As regards the present album, though, we need not worry about this dilemma, given that each of the compositions by Rebecca Saunders, Benedict Mason, Luke Bedford and John Zorn is a little masterpiece in its own right. The Arditti Quartet has not only helped to shape our perception of contemporary music over the past forty years but, thanks to their accumulated experience, these four musicians also exemplify the future of this fascinating musical universe.

Reviews

Awards Issue 2015

This outstanding disc of contemporary works, performed live by the Arditti Quartet, is one of blazing beauty and invention...[Pandora's Box] is at once operatic, darkly beautiful and surprisingly frightening, and features an exceptional performance by Sarah Maria Sun.

18th January 2015

The Arditti Quartet brings together four diverse, cutting-edge works for string quartet. The longest and most venerable is Benedict Mason’s String Quartet No.2 from 1993, which plays out like a six-movement harlequinade of sounds and techniques.

29th January 2015

this typically diverse, typically exemplary Arditti recital brings four works that were all written for the quartet on to disc for the first time...Zorn adds a soprano...to the four strings to deliver the composer’s own German text, taking the music into an expressionist world that’s sometimes close to that of the Second Viennese School, but also much more threateningly Zorn’s own.

Arditti Quartet: Pandora's Box

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