Brentano String Quartet, JACK Quartet, Formosa Quartet, Mivos Quartet - Lei Liang: String Quartets (Live) (2025) [Hi-Res]

Tracklist

01. Lamento della ninfa
02. Gobi Gloria
03. Song Recollections
04. Serashi Fragments
05. Madrigal Mongolia

This collection of string quartets by Lei Liang provides a window into some of his most meaningful sources of inspiration, with a special focus on Mongolian traditional music which has captivated Liang's imagination for many years. The album is also an opportunity to hear Lei Liang realize his aesthetic goals using an instrumentation that has brought out the best of so many composers since its codification in the 18th century. Lei Liang’s breadth of musical curiosity and openness is matched by his depth of investment in immersing himself in the traditions from which he draws, an involvement that grows from a study and personal connection alike.

The album opens with an elegant setting of Monteverdi’s Lamento della ninfa, a madrigal which is set as a dialogue between a lamenting nymph and three sympathetic male voice parts. Lei Liang revels in Monteverdi’s voice leading and changes of pace in the opening section, taking advantage of the Brentano Quartet’s impeccable ensemble playing, as the group breathes as one. Cello pizzicato supports the solo violin line (a stand-in for the nymph) in a lilting Chaconne progression, while other voices enter with embellished imitation and poignant suspensions.

Gobi Gloria, performed by the JACK Quartet, is the first of three works on this recording that is inspired by Mongolian music. One of Lei Liang’s priorities in his adaptations of folkloric material is a diligent understanding of stylistic subtleties, arrived through exhaustive study. We can hear this reverential approach in the detailed ornamentation and embellishment in Gobi Gloria. Lei’s treatment of a primary melody utilizes contrapuntal techniques that would have been familiar to Monteverdi (or at least certainly Bach, Schoenberg, and Babbitt!), subjecting it to inversion, retrograde, and retrograde-inversion treatment. Glissandi, trills, timbral shifts, and sweeps of harmonics color the evocative texture. At the work’s first climax, waves of sound cascade and crest, coalescing into a cathartic dance, while a culminating subsequent peak ushers in the work’s close joyfully, with jaunty rhythms in the high strings and spiky accented pizzicati in the low strings, setting a melody from the Nei Monggol region as a kind of cantus firmus.

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