Marc Bleuse

Quatuor a Cordes

Streichquartette
Pour quatuor a cordes
Commissioned by the Festival International d'Art Lyrique d'Aix en Provence and the Villa Medicis
Premiered June 27, 2007 at the Villa Medicis in Rome (Italy), by the Diotima Quartet --- The unity of the sound of a string quartet necessitates that the colours and contrasts also stem from a richness of the polyphony. Thus, I wanted the energy present in the sound to unfold and innervate the individual lines traced by the instruments, even more than in my previous works. The title itself evokes precisely this dimension of the writing and its development. The trajectory of this quartet, in three linked movements, exposes a very dense musical situation, at different speeds. ln fact, the sound material is organised in an extreme rallentanda in the second part, whereas the abundance of musical figures is subjected to a radical accelerando du ring the last episode. Thus, speed and the idea of saturation, closely linked, play a structural and dynamic role here. This work is dedicated to Allain Gaussin. (Franck Bedrossian)