The four string quartets of Helmut Zapf, written between 1984 and 2013 and played by the Sonar Quartett, all in first recordings. The quartets run through his whole career and can be heard as statements of position. Each asks how to write for two violins, viola and cello once the old idea of the quartet as a conversation between four reasonable people has been left behind.
Zapf was born in 1956 in Rauschengesees, in Thuringia. He studied church music in Eisenach and Halle from 1974 to 1979 and worked as cantor and organist in Eisenberg. From 1982 to 1986 he was a master student of Georg Katzer at the Akademie der Künste of the GDR, and he has been a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin since 2015. The Sonar Quartett, founded in 2006, plays here with Susanne Zapf and Wojciech Garbowski, violins, Nikolaus Schlierf, viola, and Cosima Gerhardt, cello. The disc is a co-production with Deutschlandradio, produced by Frank Kämpfer and Rolf W. Stoll, with liner notes by Ingo Dorfmüller.
The First Quartet (1984), only eight minutes long, keeps elements of a personal musical rhetoric that are still directly understandable, but the context of reasoned discourse survives only in traces. The Second, titled Sound (1993), goes further down the same road. The last remnants of rhetoric are dropped, and the four instruments no longer act as individuals but as one organism breathing together. Zapf wrote the Third (2008/10) for the Sonar Quartett, taking up the experience of the earlier pieces while trying to reconnect with tradition, an approach made from a great and sceptical distance.
The Fourth Quartet, Verschwommene Ränder (2012/13), takes its title from a text by Hendrik Jackson and is the longest work on the disc at over 26 minutes. It is cast as nine bagatelles whose titles read like fragments of the source, from leeres Brennen and Eis am Fenster to "Kein Anzeichen für Wunder". The programme runs in reverse order, from the Third Quartet back to the First, with the Fourth at the end.
CD, Wergo WER 7348 2, released in 2017.
