PETER RUZICKA (b.1948): String Quartets No. 1 "Introspezione", No. 2 "...fragment...", No. 3 "...über ein Verschwinden", No. 4 "...sich verlierend", No. 5 "Sturz" and No. 6 "Erinnerund und Vergessen" (Mojca Erdmann [soprano]), Klangschatten.

Description: With the exception of the first, Ruzicka's impressive corpus of quartet pieces lie within the period of his preoccupation with the æsthetics of Celan and Hölderlin; the second is in fact an in memoriam for Celan on the news of his suicide, not long after he had met the composer; and the sixth sets sung texts of Hölderlin. No. 1 is a kind of 'stream of consciousness' work from 1969-70, with quotations and references to pivotal earlier works in the quartet canon set against an abstract, time-suspended backdrop, the result of an experiment in manipulated consciousness and its effect on art. Both the grief-stricken alternately numb and furiously fractured second and the painfully expressive third, in memory of the composer's mother, contain quotations from late Mahler, adding both tonal references and music's most expressive vocabulary of autumnal retraction and farewell to the works' whispering, gossamer textural backdrop. By the fourth, with its thoroughly and musically integrated spoken texts taken from a variety of poetic and philosophical sources, a greater tendency toward tonality in the composer's own vocabulary is evident, in a work of great eloquence and emotional depth. The fifth "Plunge" is a work of unremitting tension, a study in unusual, fragmentary, iridescent textures, often suggesting a tonal context despite the modern idiom of the music as a whole. The substantial half-hour 2008 'Remembrance and Forgetting' was composed in close proximity to Ruzicka's Holderlin opera, and incorporates fragments from the poet's 'Mnemosyne', in an enigmatic score that suggests another view of consciousness and awareness from that of the 1st quartet, and progresses toward an evaporation into silence, mysterious and inconclusive. 2 CDs. Minguet Quartet. SACD hybrid.