Yoffe, Boris - Song of Songs - Hilliard Ensemble (The)
Leveranstid: Skickas vanligtvis inom 2-5 dagar
The Hilliard EnsembleDavid James, countertenor
Rogers Covey-Crump, tenor
Steven Harrold, tenor
Gordon Jones, baritone
Rosamunde QuartetAndreas Reiner, violin
Diane Pascal, violin
Helmut Nicolai, viola
Anja Lechner, cello
"His work has great beauty...The separate pieces amount to one big work of a lifetime, such as we so much want to write: unbegun, unended, unending. Whatever is missing has to be imagined. It's all there" - Wolfgang Rihm on Boris Yoffe's 'Book of Quartets'.
"Song of Songs", with its unique collaboration between the Rosamunde Quartett and the Hilliard Ensemble, is the ECM New Series debut for composer Boris Yoffe.
Born in St Petersburg in 1968, Boris Yoffe graduated from its Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory in 1989. The following year he emigrated to Israel, and began his studies at the Tel Aviv Music Academy in 1990. In 1997 he moved to Germany to study, initially, with Wolfgang Rihm in Karlsruhe.
"I could never really teach him anything," Prof. Rihm allows. "Why did I take him? Because he had remained immune to teaching? Probably. Also I have an intuition in these things, I hope." Indeed, "Song of Songs" is the work of a truly independent compositional voice. Yoffe describes himself as a Jewish (rather than Russian or Israeli) composer, creating work influenced by German music, Russian literature and Far Eastern philosophy and aesthetics and he likens the present album to a collection of poems.
Prodigiously prolific, Yoffe has been writing quartets almost daily since 1995, most of them around a page in length. The collection amounts to thousands of pieces by now, more are added continuously. There is nothing else like his "Book of Quartets" in the string quartet repertory. "One listens here into infinity", Paul Griffiths suggests, as we tune in to "The Book of Quartets", a work without end. This is composition as a diary, an unfolding poetic meditation.