DAVID PHILIP HEFTI (b.1975): String Quartets: Ph(r)asen, Guggisberg-Variationen, Mobile, con fuoco.

Description: Hefti's music occupies a distinctive and original soundworld, reliant on extended techniques and amorphous clouds and shafts of sound. The First is based on speech patterns, from the correspondences of Schumann and Janácek, often in pitchless rhythmic patterns. The Second consists of variations on a melancholy Swiss folksong (heard almost unadorned at first), rendered into the composer's typical shimmering dissonances, microtones and extended playing techniques. The Third is also derived from other music - Brahms' German Requiem, though here only a veiled, shadowy palimpsest of the original is audible in blurred, distorted allusions to Brahms' harmony, often further concealed by the character of the music, starkly opposed to that originally associated with the fragments referred to, and overlain with noise textures. The recent Fourth does away with traditional referents almost entirely, with extended passages of alternative technique suggesting electronic sounds or amplified crackles, hisses and squeals of actual fire. Leipzig String Quartet.