World premiere of Per Norgard’s String Quartets Nos. 7, 8, 9, and 10
Posted by Kelly in New ReleasesThere’s a special chemistry when the Kroger Quartet play music by Per Nørgård. In fact the renowned composer is so enthusiastic about the young ensemble that he has dedicated two of his most recent string quartets to them. The tenth quartet, Harvest-Timeless, was in fact composed in a dialogue with the musicians themselves. During the rehearsals of the quartet Nørgård appeared regularly in the rehearsal room with freshly-written sheets of music and was thus inspired by the musicians to compose more or to revise the score throughout the genesis of the work. Harvest-Timeless was given its first performance at the Euroart Prague Festival in April 2005. 
Born in 1932, Danish composer Per Nørgård studied privately with Vagn Holmboe and later entered the Royal Danish Conservatory, where he continued his studies with Holmboe and Høffding. Additionally, he studied privately with Nadia Boulanger in 1957. Nørgård has composed over 375 works, including six operas, two ballets, ten string quartets, and seven symphonies, along with numerous concertos and orchestral works, choral and vocal works, chamber music, and solo instrumental music.
As early as 1959, Nørgard began experimenting with “infinity series,” but it wasn’t until 1968 that he began using it more formally in his music. It gave his works the structural logic of serialism with a sound palette closer to free tonality; he used the infinity series to serialize melody, harmony, and rhythm in his compositions. In the 1980s, Nørgard’s music was influenced by the Swiss artist, dreamer, and schizophrenic patient Adolf Wölfli, who lived in a mental institution for the first three decades of the 20th century. But since the 1990s, it has become difficult to generalize about the composer’s musical palette.
These four quartets were composed from 1993 to 2005. The composer wrote String Quartet No. 7 in 1993 in honor of the bicentenary of the Danish Royal Library’s standing as a national public library. He has revised it several times since and has dedicated its final form to the Kroger Quartet.
Set in five movements, String Quartet No. 8 (Natten sænker sig som røg - Night Descending like Smoke) was written in 1995-97 and is based on music from Nørgård’s chamber opera Nuit des Hommes (Night of Mankind - Night of Men). With text by Guillaume Apollinaire, the opera is set before and during World War I. In the first movement, Prologue - Eulogy, the listener encounters a shimmering tissue of microtones, followed by an assemblage of fragments and inversions of the hymn tune Nu bede vi den helligånd (Now pray we to the Holy Ghost). Next is a section of chords repeated by all instruments in freely chosen tempi, creating a polyrhythmic heterophony.
Written for the 2001 Santa Fe Chamber Music festival, String Quartet No. 9, Ind I kilden (”into the source” or “into the spring”), is a rhythmically complex three-movement work (Allegro energico, Calmo and Lento-allegro (”brutale”) whose title serves to illuminate its form: “in other words a reversed direction that is different from the spring’s own, a motion back towards the origin and source.”
The title of String Quartet No. 10, Høsttidløs, is the name of a plant, but the literal English translation is ‘Harvest-Timeless.’ Written for the Kroger Quartet, the work refers to a signature tonality Nørgård used in the 1970s, characterized by the entrance of muted tonal chords in the violins and the viola, juxtaposed against a leitmotif in the cello consisting of descending pizzicato notes.
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