Jürg Frey & Quatuor Bozzini — String Quartets (Reissue)

From Collection QB,Quatuor Bozzini's imprint, comes a legendary recording originally produced by Editions Wandelweiser in 2006. This reissue commemorates the quartet’s 25th anniversary, and brings back an essential piece of their eclectic discography back into circulation. Swiss composerJürg Frey's String Quartets disc was met with enthusiasm
upon its release and has since been name-checked by Björk (in her interview with the Creative Independent), praised by beloved critic Alex Ross, and cited as inspiration for many others, and justifably so. Its initial run is now out-of-print.

This disc's centrepiece is the ethereal 29-minuteStreichquartett 2, which achieves its beautifully faint gauzy surface by subjecting a long string of slow chords to a fngering technique known as half-tone harmonics which blurs both the pitch and colour of each sonority. The work foats on the very brink of audibility for its entire duration, and audiencesfeel the precarious weightlessness intrinsic to its execution, even on recording. Many regard the piece as nothing short of a landmark in the string quartet tradition, fragile and majestic in equal measure. Grant Chu Covell remarked in La Folia that it
"will take your breath away, notwithstanding a resemblance to one’s fnal earthly moments."

In the original liner notes the composer cites Agnes Martin's art as an infuence on his approach—"There was a kind of visibility to her art, which I felt corresponded to the audibility in my music. Audibility: the moment when sound waves move in space and the air touches the body. The eardrum is the sensory connection between the outside and the inside world: we hear the sound and the composition." Indeed,Streichquartett 2's hushed smears of sound almost appear to be more about pure sensation than they are about any of the standard musical parameters.

The second quartet is preceded by several other shorter works. His frst quartet, from 1988, offers a personal and more restrained vision of the soft, insistent chromaticism innovated by Morton Feldman in his latter years.(Unbetitelt) VIprobes subtle variations of colour, its stately, mostly monophonic unfolding evoking plainchant. Frey distributes a scale-driven melodic fgure between the various instruments, only sparingly introducing harmony. As with the composer's other works, its ostensible simplicity gently pulls the ear into the very core of the sounds, and the quartet's characteristically immaculate
performance only serves to amplify this mesmeric magic. The diptychZwei allerletze Sächelchen (Two very last things)is striking in its delicate brevity. Each of its two movements are under a minute—just enough time to trace a feeting contour in
sound.

Quatuor Bozzini has gone on to record all of Jürg Frey's subsequent quartets, each of which has commanded similar critical acclaim. Last year’s recording ofString Quartet No. 4 was listed among Alex Ross’15 Notable Recording of 2024 in the New Yorker, and is a fnalist for theConseil québécois de la musiquePrix Opus.Naturally, the quartet brings the meticulous patience that's become their signature as an ensemble to all of these recordings. Since their inception, the Bozzinis have worked closely with some of the most important minds in contemporary music from Cassandra Miller to Christian Wolff,
and Éliane Radigue to Yannis Kyriakides. Their eagerness to explore is matched by a rigorous ear for quality and this combination has made them one of the most important chamber ensembles today, giving rise to a long string of commissioned works and some 500 premieres spanning myriad compositional approaches.