String Quartet No. 4

Description

Violin 1, Violin 2, Viola, Violoncello — Lowell Liebermann’s 4th String Quartet was commissioned by the Canandaigua Lake Chamber Music Festival and the Wood Library, Canandaigua, NY, for the Orion Quartet in celebration of their 20th Anniversary.xa0 The quartet was premiered by the Orions at the Canandaigua Lake Chamber Music Festival in Rochester, NY on February 9th, 2008.To quote the writer Mark Greenberg:“It’s a remarkable piece. The mood is elegiacal and meditative, the melodic lines sinuous and searching, the harmonies rich and astonishingly beautiful. Liebermann works within the traditions of Western tonality, but that is a mansion with many rooms.xa0 Liebermann inhabits all of them as his expressive purposes require, and he doesn’t mind knocking down a wall to create new harmonic spaces.“The Fourth Quartet doesn’t exactly fit the “neoromantic” niche into which Liebermann is sometimes placed.xa0 Much of the music, especially near the beginning, is a highly advanced and fluid chromatic expressionism with modernist tendencies.xa0 Sometimes this roiling cloudscape breaks open to allow a patch of near-classical harmony and almost-resolution.xa0 Near the midpoint the clouds lift in leaping modulations.xa0 Several chordal passages recall Russian Orthodox chant.xa0 Suddenly, when you’ve begun to think the somber, deliberate pace has gone on a bit too long, Liebermann introduces a kind of hobbled, stilted jazz idiom.xa0 The piece dies in pensive quiet.”