Wolfgang Rihm

String quartets run through the whole of Wolfgang Rihm's output, thirteen of them by the time of this release, plus ten other works for or with string quartet. This disc presents three of them: the 11. Streichquartett, Interscriptum with piano, and Grave, a requiem for a quartet player. They share no single formula, which is typical of Rihm's approach to the genre.

Rihm was born in Karlsruhe on 13 March 1952 and died in Ettlingen on 27 July 2024. He studied in Karlsruhe with Eugen Werner Velte, Wolfgang Fortner and Humphrey Searle, then with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne and Klaus Huber in Freiburg. He succeeded Velte as professor of composition in Karlsruhe in 1985; among his pupils was Rebecca Saunders. His catalogue runs to more than 400 works, and his awards include the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize (2003) and the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale (2010). The Minguet Quartett, founded in 1988 and named after the eighteenth-century Spanish philosopher Pablo Minguet, worked with Rihm for over twenty years and recorded all his works for string quartet. The pianist Markus Bellheim joins them in Interscriptum. The recording is a co-production with Deutschlandradio, with Robert F Schneider as engineer and Frank Kämpfer and Rolf W. Stoll as producers.

The 11. Streichquartett (1998/2010) was finished only after the twelfth, at the end of a gestation of twelve years, unusually long for Rihm. The result is a work of extreme contrasts: restrained and explosive, simple and virtuosic, fragile and pushed to the point of screaming. Tight homophony gives way to polyphony splintered almost to dissolution. Abrupt changes govern the detail, and on a larger scale they set apart the four movements, played without a break over thirty-five minutes.

Interscriptum. Duo für Streichquartett und Klavier (2000/02) is an elaboration of the 12th String Quartet. The quartet is treated as one instrument, and the added piano part opens a dialogue with it, as the word Duo in the title suggests. Grave (2005) was written for the Alban Berg Quartet, who had asked Rihm for a requiem. Its dedication, in memoriam Thomas Kakuska, marks it as an epitaph for the ensemble's long-serving violist, who had played many of Rihm's works. The link is close to home: the Alban Berg Quartet was among the Minguet's teachers from 1988.

CD, Wergo WER 6756 2, released in 2013, 69 minutes.