Monday, December 17, 2012

Kyzysztof Meyer, String Quartets Nos, 7, 10 and 13

Polish composer Krzysztof Meyer (b. 1943) writes string quartets of architectural complexity and high modernist purity. The Wieniawski String Quartet and Naxos issue Volume Three of the complete output this month, String Quartets Nos. 7, 10 and 13 (Naxos 8.573001), and it has very much to commend it.

No. 13 is his latest to date and along with Nos. 7 and 10, there is very much excellent music to experience. Like Bartok and Carter before him, Meyer views the configuration as appropriate for very serious and advanced sonorities and the Wieniawski Quartet bring the salient import of these works to the recorded medium with the precision and passion they demand.

These are great abstract constructions, at once intimate and multivalent. They are the sort of works that take concentrated effort to assimilate fully over a long period of time. The reward is a modern sort of sublimity.

This volume gives you an essential listen to Meyer at his most advanced. He is a composer of today that should be heard, and this is a great program for you to begin doing that.

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