Vagn Holmboe

Quartetto Sereno - String Quartet No.21 Op.197

Holmboe's last quartet work, which is unoffi­cially also String Quartet No. 21, was the last work he ever composed, and was unfinished on his death in 1996. His pupil Per Norgard has finishedthe quartet, and himself characterizes his contribution by saying that the score existed 'in an only partly completed form, which could however be written out with only a few cases of doubt'. With only two movementsand a play­ing time of about nine minutes it is at its exist­ing length the shortest of Holmboe's string quar­tets. The first movement takes the form of one long arch in a rocking triple time which constantlyshiftsamong different tempo and pulse sensations. At the same time the rhythmic en­ergy increases until the movement, in a faster Con moto tempo accelerates to a more flowing 12/8 time, coloured both rhythmically bycross-­rhythms in duple time and timbrally by harmon­ics in the viola. In its middle section, Con fuoco, the movement culminates in both tempo and expression until it falls calm in brief recapitula­tions inreverse order of the first two sections. The rocking feeling continues in the second movement, but now at a more extroverted level from the outset, Allegro and pizzicato. The en­ergy builds up further as the moodintensifies to Con fuoco, while all instruments go over to bowed playing, but like the first movement, this movement ends Adagio here however not as a gradual attenuation but through a sudden shift in tempo to a calm, imitative passage before the movement slowly thins out to the almost inaudible through a last, dense, open sounding chord with a brief violin solo above it.

The quartet is dedicated to Holmboe's wife MeLa MayHolmboe, and was given its first performance by the Kontra Quartet on 22nd March 1997 at the Carl Nielsen Academy of Music in Odense, Denmark.