Eotvos:String Quartets

by Calder Quartet / Audrey Luna

World premiere recording of Eotvos's new piece, The Sirens Cycle, along with Korrespondenz, a mini opera for string quartet

The basic architecture of Eotvos's ''The Sirens Cycle'' (2016) is simple, yet classic: three parts each devoted to different responses to the legend of the Sirens, whose singing is so lovely that those who listen are lured to their deaths. Seduction and destruction: opposite poles eternally pulling together and apart. The first part is based on James Joyce's Ulysses, in which the legend is retold in Joyce's highly unusual syntax, where words fragment and language is subsumed by sounds that aren't necessarily coherent but generate fleeting images. The second part, after a brief Interlude, uses Homer's verses in Greek, intoned with gravitas. Franz Kafka's story from 1917 supplies the text for the third part of the Cycle. Another change of literary syntax: Kafka's lines are more prose than poem. His handling of the subject is at once more brusquely down to earth, and yet more horrifying. The other piece on the record is Eotvos's ''Korrespondenz'' (String Quartet no 1, 1992) which the composer describes as ''a mini opera for string quartet'', since it's based on the correspondence between Leopold and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.