| Instrumentation: | 2 violins, viola, cello |
| Duration: | 21' (9', 6', 6') |
| Year Composed: | 2025 |
| Movements: |
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I. Allegro con brio
II. Largo con calore
III. Allegro vivace
My first string quartet, Traces of a Silent Landscape (2011), is a programmatic meditation on the tranquillity and solitude I experienced while snowshoeing in Algonquin Park in the dead of winter. Fourteen years later, my second quartet could not be more contrasting in approach and character. Whereas Traces consists of three slow movements enveloping a bustling scherzo, my second quartet bookends a single slow central movement with two fast, energetic ones. Absent is any trace of a program. The brisk first movement (Allegro con brio) introduces the work's buoyant, positive qualities: a curt, falling tune dances in a continual stream of bubbling activity; a secondary, expressive theme rises, lyrically. The contemplative inner movement (Largo con calore) offers welcome reprieve: a falling-fifth gesture, echoed in different tempos, suggests reeds swaying in a gentle breeze. The giddy finale (Allegro vivace) restores the first movement's energy, now with driving, angular, and syncopated jazz-inflected rhythms. A common thread among the movements is the interval of a fifth: subtly introduced in the first movement, it saturates the Largo then underpins the finale with power chords. The composition of this quartet gave me particular joy, a mood I hope is reflected in the music itself.
—R.R.
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