Frozen Dreams

Lera Auerbach's tenth string quartet has the poetic title Frozen Dreams. It was created as part of the project "Four Seasons", which was initiated by the Jasper String Quartet and commissioned by the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music. Together with new quartets by Akira Nishimura, Joan Tower and Chris Theofanidis, Auerbach's contribution forms a musical reflection on the seasons and the inner states of man through the ages.

The six-movements work is preceded by a poem by the composer entitled "The Seasons", which is as visually powerful as it is thought-provoking. In it, the four seasons of life - spring, summer, fall and winter - are described in a symbolically dense language that accompanies the musical events like a resonance chamber. The music itself is characterised by contrasting characters, from fleeting and mysterious to elegiac and impassive to gloomy and oppressive passages. A remarkable spectrum of expression unfolds in the only eleven minutes of playing time. As is so often the case with Auerbach, classical formal ideas and a deeply personal tonal language come together here too. Frozen Dreams is a poetic contribution to the string quartet repertoire of our time– and a striking example of Auerbach's interdisciplinary thinking as a composer, poet and pianist.