Perle: Works for String Quartet

Chronique

George Perle's international fame as the author of Serial Composition and Atonality (1962) and his reputation as a theorist overshadowed his true life's work as a composer, so an appraisal of his music has been long in coming. This album of his String Quartets No. 2, No. 5, and No. 8, as well as the single-movement Molto adagio, presents the key aspects of Perle as a composer of both tonal and serial works. The String Quartet in D minor is as straightforward a tonal piece as he could compose within his highly chromatic style, though if there is more than a resemblance to Béla Bartók's String Quartet No. 2, the similarities are enlightening (they are also quite pronounced in the Molto adagio). The String Quartet No. 5 is considerably more developed as a twelve-tone piece, following the rules laid down by Arnold Schoenberg, though Windows of Order (String Quartet No. 8) is the fullest representation of Perle's ideas of a hybrid system of dodecaphonic and tonal concepts, detailed in his book, Twelve-Tone Tonality (1978). The Daedalus Quartet emphasizes one thing above all else in their performances of Perle's quartets, and that is his idiomatic writing for strings, which always makes the intruments sound clear, present, and vibrant. Whether Perle's music is accessible or off-putting must be left to listeners' taste, experience, and adventurousness, but all can agree that his skill in composing string quartet music was first-rate, and the Daedalus Quartet plays with full bow in appreciation.
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