Since 1995 Boris Yoffe has been writing string quartets one page long, each lasting around half a minute. His Book of Quartets now runs to several thousand pages and is still growing. Song of Songs, his ECM New Series debut, draws on the roughly eight hundred pieces written in the three or four years before the recording. Some come from a related project in which four singers join the four strings, singing phrases from the biblical Song of Songs.
Yoffe was born in St Petersburg in 1968 and studied at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory. He emigrated to Israel in 1990 and moved to Germany in 1997 to study with Wolfgang Rihm in Karlsruhe. The Rosamunde Quartett, with Anja Lechner at the cello, had already played the quartets in a Munich concert series. Here they work for the first time with The Hilliard Ensemble, whose four voices match the instruments in range. The selection was made by players and composer together. Manfred Eicher produced the session at the Propstei St. Gerold in November 2009, with Peter Laenger as engineer, and the booklet carries texts by Rihm and Yoffe.
The miniatures are grouped into five long tracks, from just over four minutes to almost fourteen, each named after a line of the Song of Songs. The scores carry no indications of tempo, dynamics or articulation, so those decisions fall to the performers. The longest are I sleep, but my heart waketh and I sought him but I found him not. Throughout, strings and voices circle each other. They draw close, part again and settle, with long stretches of breath and silence in between. Yoffe, who calls himself a Jewish composer formed by German music, Russian literature and Far Eastern philosophy, compares the album to a collection of poems.
Stephen Fruitman of Cyclic Defrost wrote in 2012 that "rarely has a minimalism been so bursting with genuine human emotion". In the Irish Times, Michael Dervan noted the precedent of Schumann's miniatures but found the project "truly sui generis". David Kettle in The Strad was more reserved: he praised the performances but felt the material wears thin over a whole disc.
CD edition of ECM New Series 2174, first released on 30 September 2011, with a 20-page booklet.
