CD ECM Records Rosamunde Quartett, Hilliard Ensemble - Boris Yoffe: Song Of Songs

2011

Rosamunde Quartett
The Hilliard Ensemble
Andreas Reiner Violin
Diane Pascal Violin
Helmut Nicolai Viola
Anja Lechner Violoncello
David James Countertenor
Rogers Covey-Crump Tenor
Steven Harrold Tenor
Gordon Jones Baritone

Russian-born Israeli composer Boris Yoffe began writing short pieces for string quartet – each a page long, playing for around half a minute – in 1995, when he was in his mid-twenties. By now his Book of Quartets is a compendium of several thousand pages, and one constantly growing. The pieces on this recording were selected, by the players and by the composer, from the approximately eight hundred he has written during the last three or four years. Among them are other single-page compositions from a related, interpenetrating project in which the quartet’s four parts become eight with the addition of four singers, their voices matching the instruments in range as they sing phrases from the Song of Songs. The Rosamunde quartet and the Hilliard Ensemble collaborate for the first time in this New Series debut for Yoffe, recorded in St. Gerold in November 2009.

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Boris Yoffe’s “Song of Songs” is equally extraordinary, a selection of daily compositions for string quartet. […] A calming and enriching experience, this CD was make for unusually satisfying listening and represents ECM at its best. Highly recommended to explorer listeners who don’t seek just facile excitement.
Peter Grahame Woolf, Musical Pointers

The shuffling of miniatures has a significant compositional precedent in Schumann. But Yoffe’s seemingly accidental and strangely affecting project, full of burdened contemplation, is truly sui generis.
Michael Dervan, Irish Times