Calder Quartet & Audrey Luna - Peter Eotvos: String Quartets (CD)

World premiere recording of Eotvos's new piece, The Sirens Cycle, along with Korrespondenz, a mini opera for string qtThe basic architecture of Eotvos's 'The Sirens Cycle' (2016) is simple, yet classic: three parts each devoted to different responses to the legend of the Sirens, whose singing is so lovely that those who listen are lured to their deaths. Seduction and destruction: opposite poles eternally pulling together and apart. The first part is based on James Joyce's Ulysses, in which the legend is retold in Joyce's highly unusual syntax, where words fragment and language is subsumed by sounds that aren't necessarily coherent but generate fleeting images. The second part, after a brief Interlude, uses Homer's verses in Greek, intoned with gravitas. Franz Kafka's story from 1917 supplies the text for the third part of the Cycle. Another change of literary syntax: Kafka's lines are more prose than poem. His handling of the subject is at once more brusquely down to earth, and yet mor