Enigma

ENIGMA: The Project that Withstood Hurricane Covid

ENIGMA: The Project that Withstood Hurricane Covid

All of our most successful collaborations eventually move beyond a professional arrangement and into a genuine friendship (if they didn’t start that way to begin with!). We were lucky, then, to have flown Anna from London to Chicago to workshop Enigma at the Adler Planetarium in the…before-times. There is no technology available that can replicate the bond that develops between a composer and an ensemble when they have to brave downtown parking together, transition from awkward handshakes to meaningful hugs, or simply breathe the same air in a rehearsal.

Limelight Magazine: ENIGMA – A startling string quartet, like you’ve never heard it, for these pandemic times.

Limelight Magazine: ENIGMA – A startling string quartet, like you’ve never heard it, for these pandemic times.

Suspended and caught in the moment between sleeping and waking, Anna Thorvaldsdóttir’s Enigma inhabits a hazy, hallucinogenic dream-world of half-formed shapes fusing hypnotically in and out of focus. It’s a striking first string quartet by the young Icelandic composer, rendered here with glacial grandeur by the Chicago-based Spektral Quartet, whose acutely detailed, inordinately sensitive playing precisely pitches itself at the boiling centre of still-forming immensities.

Textura: Spektral Quartet – ENIGMA

Textura: Spektral Quartet – ENIGMA

Spektral Quartet brings a surgical precision to every aspect of the score, which demands from its interpreters sensitivity to quarter-tone pitch alterations, subtle gradations of bow pressure, and the ability to play at the level of a whisper. Beyond the usual bowing and plucking, scrapes, slides, taps, clicks, pops, and other tactile gestures are required for the realization of the work. Such effects are in keeping with the composer's concept, which has to do with the “in-between,” the shadowy zone between sound and silence. Immense concentration by the players is needed for the three-movement work to blossom and transform at a measured pace that feels natural. Texture and sound design override melody in her micro-detailed tapestry, which isn't a critical observation but rather a descriptive one. Enigma isn't without emotion either, as moods and tones arise ranging from solemn and cryptic to ecstatic and lyrical.

Best of Bandcamp Contemporary Classical: August 2021

Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir has consistently evoked the sounds and vistas of the natural world in her instrumental writing—the fecund valleys and stark coasts of her homeland, in particular—and her first string quartet is no exception. Masterfully performed by Chicago’s Spektral Quartet, this three-movement gem balances astringent abstraction—including unpitched noises and percussive extended techniques—with melancholic grandeur, often voicing those polarities at once. The aptly titled Enigma is fueled by a sense of mystery, translating sounds foreign and familiar to our holistic experiences on Earth in order to deliberately smear the line between the quotidian and the sublime. Sounds from each side of the divide overlap, collide, and inform one another, producing a deliciously ambiguous trip that seems apropos for our fraught times. Despite the emotional uncertainty some passages transmit, spiked as they are with dissonance and brittleness, there’s an abiding humanity at the heart of the music that provides a guiding light.

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NPR Music: Spektral Quartet, 'Enigma: III' (Anna Thorvaldsdottir)

Describing Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir's Enigma – her first string quartet – is not easy, but imagine you're suspended in some primordial gas cloud where matter is transforming, regenerating, building toward the birth of a planet. In the final section of the half-hour piece, long arcs of shifting sound deliver melodies in slow motion, while the composer's extended techniques for the players can make a violin sound like a woodwind or a synthesizer. Percussive creaks and snaps collide with slippery glissandos that flash across the score like tails of cosmic particles in the black nothingness. The performance, by the Spektral Quartet, makes the music feel vast and intimate at once. In an introduction to the score, Thorvaldsdottir dispenses some colorful advice: "When you see a long sustained pitch, think of it as a fragile flower that you need to carry in your hands and walk the distance on a thin rope without dropping it or falling." Good luck.

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Headphone Commute: Spektral Quartet performs Anna Thorvaldsdottir

Headphone Commute: Spektral Quartet performs Anna Thorvaldsdottir

The voices on the three-movement piece sigh and howl, caress and gash, cry out and whisper. Some scratching sounds inevitably give me goosebumps on the skin, the way the human nails kiss the chalkboard (I wonder what the articulation for those “notes” looks like on a sheet), as I imagine phantoms in the dark, their shadows on the walls and in between my bedsheets. There is a movement in the corner of my room, but when I look it’s gone, and only curtains slowly sway with their disdain and laughter. This music is unnerving, ominous and raw, and, once again, I wonder how these sounds can convey a real feeling.

I Care If You Listen: Anna Thorvaldsdóttir and Spektral Upend the String Quartet on Enigma

I Care If You Listen: Anna Thorvaldsdóttir and Spektral Upend the String Quartet on Enigma

Spektral’s execution is so microscopically precise that it gives it a voltaic momentum.

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But this is no mere collection of eerie sound effects — Enigma evolves as the mysterious noises gradually blend into the chordal structures. In the third movement, particularly, multiple layers of sound spin centripetally into harmoniously stable grounds, only to ebb away at last into the pitchlessness of the opening. With that deceptively simple approach, Anna upends the string quartet genre and takes the listener on a nearly psychedelic trip into the unknown.

And yet, what is most disquieting about Enigma is that its most harrowing and despairing moments — contrasted by those elusive, not-so-consoling chorale progressions — make the listening experience uncomfortably familiar in our time. Whether a dirge for the countless Covid-related deaths that could have been avoided, or for the depletion of our natural resources, it is a death knell for the 21st century cast in a centuries-old musical form. Listen with the lights off.

An Earful: Record Roundup - Enigmas And Excitations

An Earful: Record Roundup - Enigmas And Excitations

Those are some reasons I was all aquiver when I heard that Anna Thorvaldsdottir, one of the preeminent composers of our time, had written a string quartet. The work, called Enigma, premiered in Washington DC in 2019 and is finally being released on August 27th in a stunning performance by the Spektral Quartet, beautifully produced by Dan Merceruio for Sono Luminus. Right from the start of the three-movement work it's obvious that Thorvaldsdottir is operating on her own trajectory, with little reference to what's come before in the medium. Beginning with some mysterious alchemy that has the strings sounding like a distant wind, or someone's breath, Enigma is instantly arresting. Long, drawn-out chords further the pi

Washington Post: Whistles, rumbles, bleeps: New Icelandic music sounds like no string quartet you’ve ever heard

“The premiere was the finale of an appealing program which, according to quartet violinist Clara Lyon, was meant to evoke the experience of looking up at the night sky, studded with a range of disparate stars. The Chicago-based quartet juxtaposed, on the first half, music by Tomás Luis de Victoria, the 16th-century priest-composer; Eliza Brown, also from Chicago; and Beethoven, represented by his final quartet, Op. 135. The quartet gave the latter an engaging reading: warm-blooded and communicative, emphasizing humanity over admiration of the Greatness of the Work.”

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