Reto Bieri’s solo album Contrechant, released in 2011, was widely praised for the Swiss clarinettist’s beauty of tone and his uncommon expressiveness with extended instrumental techniques. Quasi Morendo begins with a new exploration of one of the pieces featured on Contrechant, Salvatore Sciarrino’s Let Me Die Before I Wake (1982), with its “whisper-quiet sound world of harmonics, multiphonics and tremolandos” (The Guardian). Bieri is then joined by Finnish string quartet Meta4 for a profound interpretation of Johannes Brahms’s Quintet op 115 (1891). Inspired by Brahms’s friendship with clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld the quintet sounds freer, and more idyllic, than the composer’s earlier chamber music, yet is one of his most meticulously constructed works. The album closes with Gérard Pesson’s Nebenstück (1998), a ghostly re-arrangement of Brahms’s Ballade, Op. 10 No. 4.

Tales from Norway transforms musical stories from Norwegian folk traditions into new compositions that defy genre-related labelling and envision a broader, bolder concept of “contemporary music”.

It is primarily for his large-scale orchestral works that Sebastian Fagerlund (b. 1972) has attracted attention, but throughout his career he has also composed chamber music. In his production, orchestral and chamber music have a fruitful relationship in which a chamber work may contain the germ of ideas that then appear in a new form in an orchestral score. One example of this is Fuel – a set of six miniatures from 2010 – which grows out of the same basic material as Ignite, a work for large orchestra completed in the same year, although they differ greatly in scale and in character. Common to the two genres is also Fagerlund’s firm grasp of the capabilities of the instruments he is writing for.

Con questo Vol. I d'una Opera Omnia ancora in corso, arriviamo subito alla piena maturità dell'importante musicista finlandese, ma anche forse del Meta4, importante quartetto connazionale: direi che si son fatti un regalo reciproco con questa produzione, ovviamente Ondine. Seppure resta per me sospeso il giudizio se queste possano essere delle interpretazioni di riferimento.

Before Felix Mendelssohn produced his Octet for strings in 1825, only Louis Spohr had composed for a similar combination of instruments. Rather than an octet, however, Spohrs work was a double quartet written for two equal but independent string quartets. Mendelssohn, on the other hand, treated the eight instruments as a single unit, collaborating in symphonic orchestral style, as he himself put it. He was only sixteen when he composed the Octet, full of a youthful ardour that has made it one of his most popular works. It is a farewell to the Mozartian style that had characterized Mendelssohns early production and at the same time a first step on the way to Romanticism.