PER NØRGÅRD (b.1932): String Quartets No. 7, No. 8 "Night Descending like Smoke", No. 9 "Into the Source" and No. 10 "Harvest Timeless".

Description: Typically of Nørgård, these quartets each has its own completely distinctive character, despite being readily identifiable as to the composer. His extensive use of microtones blends seamlessly with the extended tonality employed in his more recent works (which have generally embraced a progressively more tonal idiom since the early 1990s, while remaining as individual and forward-looking as ever). While generating characteristically Nørgårdian textures, homages to earlier models in the quartet genre abound; Bartók especially in the ninth, Berg in the seventh, earlier examples yet in the tenth. The eighth, based on material from Nørgård's opera set around the time of World War I, contain some marvelously evocative, sculptural assemblages of sonorous texture, some of the most innovative quartet writing of our time, without resorting to the excesses of the avant garde. Kroger Quartet.