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Review: Paredes US tour

Hilda Paredes' work 'Son dementes cuerdas' has just received a premier performance and tour in the US. Written for guitar and string quartet, the work was performed by the Arditti Quartet and Elliot Fisk. The premiere took place in the Library of Congress on 24th March. The work was well received and one reviewer, Jay Harvey.

Harvey writes:

Other instruments, singly and in combination, have been subject to the gravitational pull of the evolving string quartet. This fact also was underlined by the concert at the Indiana History Center, which had as centerpiece a 2016 work for guitar and string quartet, "Son dementes cuerdas," by Hilda Paredes. The composer's program notes suggest the interest that idiomatic styles are juxtaposed and contrasted, and similar techniques, such as glissandi, are presented to expose differences in timbre between guitar and string quartet.

Variegated textures were quickly brought to the fore, and the interaction of the five players often had the effect of one new instrument with five constituents. To return to the astronomical analogy, the binary star system of guitar and string quartet in this work exchanges so much gravitational energy that something new and far-reaching is born. 

His full review can be found here.

(4 Apr 2017)

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