Wolfgang Rihm - Interscriptum (2000-02) Duo für Streichquartett und Klavier

Interscriptum (2000-02) Duo für Streichquartett und Klavier
Composer: Wolfgang Rihm (1952-2024)
Performers: Arditti Quartet; Nicolas Hodges, piano
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"According to conventional wisdom, Wolfgang Rihm is the most famously prolific contemporary composer. He produces music just as he breathes: permanently, without pause, from his gut reaction. The 'diary-like' trio of works formed by his string quartets nos. five through seven was written more or less in one ecstatic stretch: 'I maintain an intense sexual relationship with my work; I conceive, I carry, I fertilize, I give birth. The body of a composition is not at all a paper existence for me. This structural development does not lead away from life, but deeper and deeper into life itself.' In addition, Rihm repeatedly cultivates the seeds and sprouts of particular compositions, expanding them into whole series of works and cycles, where an initial score blossoms into new states of being, as with the five orchestra pieces Vers une symphonie fieuve (1992-2000) and the complex of works around his "Search for a Theater" Séraphin (2011), after Antonin Artaud. His own artistic motto, 'The work is a search for the work', is also reflected in his so-called 'inscriptions'. In contrast to 'writing over' or the painter Arnulf Reiner's 'painting over' — where something new covers what is already there so that the original material disappears completely — these 'inscriptions' add new lines or layers to existing scores in order to illuminate and re-animate these works from within. In this sense, Interscriptum — Duo for String Quartet and Piano (2000/02) is a re-working of Rihm's 12th String Quartet (2000/01). To the quartet ensemble, treated as 'one instrument', a piano part is added, which — as the title 'Duo' indicates — initiates a dialogue and creates entirely new relationships within the piece.

In the brief slow introduction, the piano and quartet at first alternate [...]. However, already in the second measure, they begin together a slow rising and falling succession of pitches like an overarching arpeggio. The resulting calm is nonetheless soon over. In the following Allego motto, agitato, the strings rush in hand-over-foot with wild chains of intervals, to which the piano at first only comments with isolated accented notes and chords. After unsuccessful attempts to establish calm, the driving 32nd-note runs, pulsations, and staccato accents of the strings spill over into the piano part. The impulsiveness as in Rihm 's later 13th String Quartet (2011) grows into a swirling, unstoppable vortex. Just before the end, the incessant racing, searching, and charging around come to rest again in a Lento passage faintly reminiscent of the slow introduction at the beginning. The energy, gestures, and inexorable progression in this music correspond to Rihm's ideal of a kind 'vegetative composing', which develops in a natural, idiosyncratic, and instinctive manner, without consideration for compositional strategies, recipes, systems, formulas, or theories of material: 'Music goes on thinking for itself, once it has been thought of. [...] The result — at least the hope and intention — is a constantly self-renewing kind of music which permits the listener to participate in its creation, revealing the point of generation from which it grows.' "

~Rainer Nonnenmann (translated by John Patrick Thomas and W. Richard Rieves)
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[baileyreidrickman]

Basically his String Quartet No. 12 mixed in with Piano.
Not that I’m saying it’s bad, it’s a pretty good combination actually.