• List Price: $15.99  
• Your Price: $15.99
• In Stock: 11

You must login to place orders.




Not purchasing for a business? See our consumer site.

The 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 more horrifying. The other piece on the record is Eotvos's "Korrespondenz" (String Quartet no 1, 1992) which the composer describes as "a mini opera for string quartet", since it's based on the correspondence between Leopold and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Track Listing

Press Quotes

The Sirens Cycle is elegantly structured, so intricate and so complex that it will no doubt reveal even greater riches the more familiar it becomes. It works so well because it combines the breadth of vision of an opera, yet is as concise as a chamber miniature. It's exquisite, and could take its place as one of Eötvös's finest works.

     —Anne Ozorio, Opera Today

Eötvös joins their company with The Sirens Cycle (2015/16), a complex work operating in a number of dimensions including pre-compositional spectral analysis of the spoken text.

     —Roger Knox, thewholenote.com (CAN)

The BMC label continues to do Peter Eötvös proud... His admirers will doubtless snap up this disc regardless but it is wholeheartedly recommended to anyone interested in the string quartet medium.

     —Richard Hanlon, musicweb-international.com (UK)

Indeed, anyone interested in contemporary string and string quartet writing will find it a fulfilling and memorable 50+ minutes' worth of intimate yet confident and direct music making.

     —Mark Sealey, musicweb-international.com (UK)