PIERRE-DOMINIQUE PONNELLE (b.1957): String Quartets Nos. 1 & 2, String Trio.

Description: Ponnelle has had a notable parallel career as conductor throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states, extending to the most eastern of these. The influences of the vast range of western concert music that he has been involved in, and the musics native to the regions where he has worked have found their way into his own music in intriguing combinations. The first quartet has elements of the classical quartet tradition, which distort into motifs derived from folk music of the Urals, and from which a familiar theme - B-A-C-H - ultimately emerges. The second utilises Sufic melodies, presented over imitative drone or percussive accompaniment suggestive of their original context, in combination with contrasting material in the western contemporary tradition, with hints of Shostakovich, which accelerates away from the folk material as though toward a point of inflection or watershed between the two. The trio is a melodic work in which the instruments trade places in terms of overall register, a sense of search interrupted by a central prayer-like section, after which normal proportions and relations are restored, with the cello offering a final departure downward with the retuning of its C string. Gémeaux Quartet.