Beethoven / Hillborg

The Calder Quartet invites you on a journey from early to late Beethoven, passing through an exciting contemporary piece by Swedish composer Anders Hillborg along the way. Beethoven's 'Op. 131 String Quartet', that concludes this album, is already a great adventure in its own right, with its seven movement full of fugal writing, harmonic explorations, variations and passages filled with operatic drama. Hearing this late masterpiece together with the much more classical, but equally lively, 'Op. 18, no. 3 Quartet' opens our ears to the exceptional richness of Beethoven's musical universe. Hillborg's 'Kongsgaard Variations' reveals unexpected sonic relationships to Beethoven's variation technique, underlining the modernity of the older composer. This all leads to a program that is lively, layered and ravishingly beautiful.