Abrahamsen - String Quartets

The Guardian 100

Arditti Quartet
(Winter & Winter)

Hans Abrahamsen’s string quartets span almost 40 years, virtually the whole of his career as a composer. The first, a set of 10 preludes, dates from 1973, and the second, cast, like those that followed, in a more conventional four-movement form, appeared in 1981. But it was then 27 years until the third, a period that included the long creative silence Abrahamsen endured during the 1990s.

The Ardittis play the quartets in reverse order, opening with the most extraordinary, the Fourth, which the group premiered in 2012. Its icy harmonics, lonely pizzicatos and densely packed reflections, which seem to find a kind of catharsis in the tumbling, stuttering dance of the finale, is very much the world that Abrahamsen has made uniquely his own over the past decade. Tracing the way he came to that utterly original music from a starting point among early 20th-century modernists is one of the incidental rewards of this wonderfully played, definitive collection that includes some of the most important quartet music of our time.