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Cover CD

-->String Quartet No. 2, «The Helvetic» (2010)

Galatea Quartet

-->String Quartet No. 3, «Über die Zeit» (2011)

Galatea Quartet

-->String Quartet No 4, «1 for 4, 4 for 1» (2011)

Galatea Quartet

Review in Rondo Magazin – Susanne Benda, 22 February 2025: The Swiss canton of Innerrhoden is known for being the last canton to introduce women’s suffrage – in 1991! Far fewer people, however, are likely aware that there is also a piece of folk music there called “Gaggerli”, which, based on the traditional schottische rhythm, imitates the clucking of a chicken. All the more commendable, then, that Swiss composer Fabian Müller, born in 1964, built the first movement of a string quartet on the “Gaggerli”, a quartet that—with a playful nod to Dvořák’s “American” Quartet—he calls “The Helvetic.” Indeed, Müller, a passionate music ethnologist, also weaves into the work a Ticinese lullaby, a natural yodel called “Jüüzli”, and a spirited galop. Yet the appeal of it all lies not only in the ironic play with the source material but also in the virtuosity of its treatment. Müller’s Third Quartet has a similar directness, making Switzerland—the land of clocks—and with it the passage of time its subject. The chime of Big Ben flickers in various disguises throughout the first movement; the second is a melancholy portrait of an old grandfather clock; and the finale, carried by the brilliant strings, whose soloistic qualities Müller gives a platform in his Fourth Quartet, pushes toward extreme density. Anyone who has once heard how the chicken clucking in the first movement of the Second Quartet dies away with a falling fourth, or how in the middle movement of the Third Quartet the steady ticking of seconds peters out weakly, will never get it out of their ears.

P 2025 // -->Ars Produktion // 38675