The Verona Quartet, Telegraph Quartet & Jasper String Quartet - Richard Festinger: String Quartets 2, 4 & 5 (2026) Hi-Res

San Francisco Bay Area composer Richard Festinger enters the string quartet genre’s 250-year conversation and comes away with something genuinely new. This landmark recording brings together three of the composer's most significant chamber works performed by three acclaimed young string quartets. These remarkable compositions engage deeply with the classical music tradition while pursuing distinctly contemporary formal and expressive concerns.

Composed across a span of sixteen years, these three works trace an arc of formal invention, emotional depth, and — in the case of Icarus in Flight — a genuinely novel compositional method. Together they represent Richard Festinger’s decades-long engagement with a genre that has occupied composers from Haydn and Beethoven through Bartók and Shostakovich to the present day. Taking advantage of the string quartet's blend of homogeneous sonority, coloristic range, contrapuntal richness and potential for virtuosity, these works are at once fresh and decidedly of their own time.

String Quartet No. 2, From the Beginning was composed in 2005 to mark the 20th anniversary season of the San Francisco new-music ensemble Earplay. Cast in two connected movements — a hovering, interior slow movement giving way without pause to an intense, extroverted finale — the piece has drawn praise for its architectural clarity and expressive reach. Reviewing the premiere for San Francisco Classical Voice, critic Benjamin Frandzel wrote that the quartet finds “this composer working at a very high level in a work marked by intelligence, focused clarity and expressive depth.” A second SFCV review described the work's trajectory as one that "progresses captivatingly from ethereal desolation to swarming excitement,” and the New York Times’ Allan Kozinn cited “angular violin melodies [that] give From the Beginning a sense of mystery that evaporates in the fast second movement to create a bright, lively finale.” On this recording, the Verona String Quartet brings that trajectory vividly to life.

String Quartet No. 4, Icarus in Flight is the recording's most conceptually daring work — and one of the more unusual pieces in the recent quartet literature. Commissioned by the San Francisco-based ClimateMusic Project, the thirty-minute work maps 200 years of climate data (1880 projected to 2080) directly onto the music's structure: population growth governs the density of musical events, rising carbon emissions expand the pitch range from a mid-range perfect fifth to a span of over six octaves, and increasing human land use is rendered as a growing proportion of pizzicato, tremolo, sul ponticello and other timbres. The invention of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic material within that framework was left entirely to Festinger's own abundantly fertile musical imagination The result is a richly textured, dramatically shaped piece of music, not a scientific exercise. The Musical Gourmet’s Joseph Gold, writing after the world premiere by the Telegraph String Quartet, called the work's power "visceral," praising its "effective arching melodies" and "piquant rhythms," placing Festinger as "the logical continuation of Béla Bartók." The Telegraph Quartet reprise it here with the authority Gold attributes to them as "masters of this medium."

String Quartet No. 5, completed in 2021 and performed here by the Jasper String Quartet, closes the album with a work in three movements played without pause. An athletic, wide-ranging opening idea recurs rondo-like across the first movement; a richly colored recitative — built around a recurring upward glissando "evoking an intake of breath" — forms the emotional core of the second, moving between muted restlessness and overt lyricism. The work concludes with a brilliant Allegro con brio finale, punctuated by a capricious scherzando, after which an “animated colloquy” among the four instruments brings the quartet to a close with a sweeping flourish. The Jasper String Quartet, cited by The Strad for their “sonically delightful and expressively compelling” playing, offers up a brilliant rendition on this world premiere recording.

Across all three of these quartets, Festinger writes with a composer's full awareness of the genre's history and a clear determination to add something of his own to it. The performances, by three quartets drawn from the top tier of today's chamber music world, match that ambition at every turn, offering interpretations of exceptional technical command and interpretive depth.