At their Jordan Hall concert this Sunday, November 12, the Juilliard String Quartet will perform the Boston Premiere of Argentinian composer Ezequiel Vinao's String Quartet No. 2 (The Loss and the Silenece). Below is a description of String Quartet No. 2 from the press release on the work's World Premiere at the Juilliard School on October 20:
"Ezequiel Viñao’s second string quartet is a synthesis of the composer’s work to date. It incorporates the four main threads that run, to a greater or lesser degree, through all of his music: the structural use of rhythmic cycles; the unfolding of long melismae (spun mainly from Mozarabic chant); the concert of re-interpretation, and an interest in Medieval thought and traditions.
The work opens with a sonata-type form. The Loss and the Silence - Tolkien’s phrase - was originally the title of the second movement. In Tolkien’s story, an immortal ageless maiden chooses mortality in order to be with the mortal man she loves. After many years of dwelling together in bliss, the man, at last, feels that his life draws to an end. She is overborne by grief and a keen sense of the mortality that she has taken upon her. The story’s substance relates to the early Christian symbols of "Mortality" and "Fall." "Mortality," understood as "the gift of the One to Men," and "Fall," as the result of a rebellion against this gift, leading to a desire for power and the corrupted use of man’s inner talents with the "object of bull-dozing the real world, of coercing other wills."
The third movement is a deconstructed dance form. The fourth movement begins with a reference to the sound world of the previous movement as an introduction to a perpetual motion process built around a rhythmic cycle. In a brief fifth movement, an epilogue to the piece, echoes of the second movement are heard."
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