Pizzicato

The Kreutzer Quartet presents four works by composer friends of different ages. This is the ensemble’s second recording of the Piano Quintet by Gloria Coates, who died in 2023, again with Roderick Chadwick at the piano. Poems by Emily Dickinson provide her with an extra-musical reference, as do the watercolors ‘Study of Sea’ by William Turner for Joel Järventausta.

In his quartet, Thomas Metcalf asked himself what the Thames sounds like. By pixelating the visual world, he wanted to create a relationship between the natural world and the man-made world or technology.

Sadie Harrison wrote her quartet ‘10,000 Black Men Named George: The Multiple Burdens of Injustice’ in the week after Floyd’s death to express her solidarity, guilt and pain. The work is a meditation on Martin Luther King’s favorite hymn ‘Precious Lord, Take My Hand’.

The works by Sadie Harrison, Järventausta and Metcalf were written during the Covid pandemic and were premiered under the constraints of social distancing.

The Kreutzer Quartet, experienced in performing modern music, also knows how to master the quintet, in which one half of the quartet is tuned a ¼ tone higher. The scordatura is essential for the overtones of the piano and thus for the chordal elements of the microtonal harmonies. This gives an insight into the composer’s harmonic ideas, which the quartet models excellently.

The ensemble knows how to present all the works convincingly and not only appealingly. The fact that these pieces are not immediately accessible to every listener should not deter those interested from devoting themselves to these recordings with curiosity.

—Uwe Krusch