Ramon Lazkano Enno Poppe Luigi Dallapiccola

A double première of quartets – such is the daunting history of the quartet that both composers required a great deal of reflection in writing their works: Enno Poppe wrote Buch (Book) in memory of Pierre Boulez. As he composed he often thought of Livre pour cordes, a work that he had long admired but had never found the key to unlock its mysteries. “Buch is not the key, but my pursuit of it, a sign of respect” (Enno Poppe).
In writing about Lurralde, a quartet composed in 2012, Ramon Lazkano said “The string quartet fascinates me, as I think it does many of us: it belongs to a precise era with its own musical, technical and social constraints; it can therefore be seen to be quite anachronistic in the 20^th century. It is this accumulated dust which reveals a remarkable potential. In Ezkil (Bell), composed by Lazkano in 2002, the guitar is tuned with quarter tones, imbuing it with an unusual sonority and producing virtuosic harmonies.
Performances of Luigi Dallapiccola’s (1904-1975) Goethe Lieder are just rare, as is the instrumentation required: voice and three clarinets (E flat, B flat and bass). In 1953, Dallapiccola read The Book of Suleika from Goethe’s 1819 twelve-book series West-Oestlicher Divan. He based seven songs on what read, composing them in twelve-tone serialism. They were very much in his likeness: refined, free, and wrought by romantic undercurrents.