Quartetto Sereno - String Quartet No.21 Op.197

Quartetto Sereno - String Quartet No.21 Op.197 (op. posth.) by Vagn Holmboe.

Holmboe's last quartet work, which is unoffi­cially also String Quartet No. 21, was the last work he evercomposed, and was unfinished on his death in 1996. His pupil Per Nørgård has finished the quartet, and himself characterizes his contribution by saying that the score existed “in an only partlycompleted form, which could however be written out with only a few cases of doubt”. With only two movements and a play­ing time of about nine minutes it is at its exist­ing length the shortest of Holmboe'sstringquar­tets. The first movement takes the form of one long arch in a rocking triple time which constantly shifts among different tempo and pulse sensations. At the same time the rhythmic en­ergy increases until themovement, in a faster Con moto tempo accelerates to a more flowing 12/8 time, coloured both rhythmically by cross-­rhythms in duple time and timbrally by harmon­ics in the viola. In its middle section, Confuoco, the movement culminates in both tempo and expression until it falls calm in brief recapitula­tions in reverse order of the first two sections. The rocking feeling continues in the second movement, but now at a moreextroverted level from the outset, Allegro and pizzicato. The en­ergy builds up further as the mood intensifies to Con fuoco, while all instruments go over to bowed playing, but like the first movement, thismovement ends Adagio here however not as a gradual attenuation but through a sudden shift in tempo to a calm, imitative passage before the movement slowly thins out to the almost inaudible through a last, dense, opensounding chord with a brief violin solo above it.

The quartet is dedicated to Holmboe's wife MeLa May Holmboe, and was given its first performance by the Kontra Quartet on 22nd March 1997 at the Carl Nielsen Academy of