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Anna THORVALDSDOTTIR (b.1977)
Enigma (2020) [28:28]
Spektral Quartet
rec. October 2020, Sono Luminus Studios, Boyce, USA
SONO LUMINUS DSL-92250 [28:28]

Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s String Quartet was written for the Spektral Quartet and recorded in October 2020. It’s a three-movement piece lasting rather less than half an hour and contains abundant evidence of her remarkable approach to sonority and to the divisions, elisions and complexities of noise and music. This is her first string quartet and we have to hope and expect it’s not her last because in this form she seems to be able to focus and clarify essential sonic questions.

The most obvious is contained in the work’s opening where one hears a blizzard of noise that slowly becomes more focused and defined and more identifiable as music. Despite the small ensemble the sonority is huge. The recording acoustic seems to expand ever outwards to contain her constant oscillations of noise and music: this is a quartet with quasi-symphonic amplitude but not merely that. It plays with one’s conception of chamber and symphonic mass, takes one on a flux-fuelled journey between massive blocks of sound and sudden eruptive flurries. And – perhaps fancifully – the bigness of her conception seems to summon up the emergence of a life force and subliminally one hears the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth or Haydn’s Creation, amorphous and seemingly directionless suddenly, blindingly, changed.

Whatever one feels about this, it’s indisputable that nature emerges from this block-like blizzard of sound. New colours pulse and birdsong can be heard, harmonies shape themselves into more consoling material. Pizzicati and col legno percussive rhythms introduce a greater range of possibilities, draw something definable from the dark matter of the early paragraphs of the quartet. The music progresses to embrace a kind of filmic melancholy that moves into a kind of sublimated chorale suffused with nobility.

The journey of the first movement, from noise to nobility, seems to come unstuck in the second movement which explores more fractured sounds, whether they are clicks, instrumental thumps, dislocated rhythms and pizzicati once again. There’s a quasi-improvised feel to all this with coiling arco and a cello line dark as slate. One the finale starts we are again confronted with birdsong, but this time it’s eerie, sounding like a slide whistle. Sonorities are nevertheless incrementally warmer, though the music is still inherently unstable and unsettled until the opening blizzard of noise returns and we realise that a kind of Franckian cyclical scheme has been at work. It feels as if one has been on a huge journey, through enormous vistas, a sonic terrain of complexity and yet, at its core, consolation to arrive at our beginning.

The Spektral Quartet are well named in respect of this work as there is something elemental, and spectral, about this composition. They play astoundingly well. The recording is tremendously immediate but not constricted and it expands as the music expands. It also catches every sonic accretion. This is a quartet work like no other, an encounter with darkness and light, birdsong and chorale, music and noise.

Jonathan Woolf

Previous review: David McDade