Siggi String Quartet: South of the Circle
Sono Luminus

Bold and uncompromising, South of the Circle reflects two things in particular: the Siggi String Quartet's passion for contemporary classical material, the earliest of its pieces written in 2011; and Sono Luminus's ongoing support for Icelandic artists, with the group itself and the five composers featured on the hour-long recording all from the country. The recording, the quartet's debut, takes on an even greater personal character when one of the five works is by quartet member Una Sveinbjarnardóttir, who shares violin duties with Helga Þóra Björgvinsdóttir (violist Þórunn Ósk Marínósdóttir and cellist Sigurður Bjarki Gunnarsson round out the group).

Yet while the recording makes good on the Siggi String Quartet's commitment to new music, the group, which was formed in 2012 during the Young Scandinavian Composers festival in Reykjavik, isn't averse to playing earlier material, too; while concerts might include works by Glass, Feldman, Cage, and Schnittke, its repertoire extends back to the Renaissance and includes pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Schubert. A kind of quid pro quo results from the breadth of material performed, with the explorations in sound and texture associated with contemporary works enhancing the group's performances of the standard repertoire, and benefits accrue in the other direction, too. Arguably the most satisfying material presented on South of the Circle incorporates aspects of both, forward-thinking experimentation on the one hand and the kind of elegance, expressiveness, and directness one associates with earlier Romantic works (e.g., the plaintive “Plainsong” that ends Valgeir Sigurðsson's Nebraska).

Formally, Daníel Bjarnason's opening Stillshot (2015) is said to resemble a chaconne, though the more interesting detail about it has to do with his own description of the piece as depicting the “fragmented memories of a noblewoman” and involving the early days of photography when a person would have to stay still during the camera-operating process to produce a clear picture. If the work's dark, unsettled character, dynamic and tempo contrasts, and short, taut phrases tend to conceal the chaconne dimension, the ten-minute performance is no less gripping as a result. Concluding the album is Haukur Tómasson's highly rhythmic Serimonia (2014), a texture-heavy exercise that advances from spidery, percussive-sounding beginnings onto sequences marked by short, stabbing figures and long, undulating lines.

Two of the settings, Sveinbjarnardóttir's Opacity (2014) and Sigurðsson's Nebraska (2011), are four-movement works. For the former, the Siggi member composed movement-long solos for each quartet instrument, with the intensely lyrical first featuring the second violin, the urgent second the cello, the third the viola, and the last the first violin. A strong improvised feeling energizes the material when each soloist is granted room to maneuver within the guidelines set by the composer. Even better, all four quartet members are granted opportunities to distinguish themselves, with Marínósdóttir, for instance, imbuing the lament “Elegia” with vibrato-rich playing that oozes sorrow. Sigurðsson so-titled his piece because its commissioner, The Chiara String Quartet, was in residency at the University of Nebraska at the time, which prompted the composer to imagine parallels between the geographical properties of Iceland and Nebraska. Like Opacity, Nebraska's a wide-ranging work whose movements distill different facets of the subject matter into musical form. To that end, “Landlocked” offsets long, flowing lines suggestive of water movement with sharp strokes evoking barrier-like containment; rapid, incessant flow in “Erosion,” on the other hand, could be taken for an aural analogue to the collapse of land material along a raging river's edge.

August 2019