BEN JOHNSTON: STRING QUARTETS NOS. 6, 7, & 8 Kepler Quartet: Sharan Leventhal, violin I; Eric Segnitz, violin II; Brek Renzelman, viola; Karl Lavine, cello
I first learned about this composer in college when I bought a CD for a John Cage recording and it also included a Ben Johnston String Quartet. The freakish difficulty in playing this music is not a gimmick. The composer had something very specific he wanted to express and the music is quite ... well... musical goddamnit. Johnston died last year, three years after this recording was finished. Huge props to the Kepler Quartet for allowing Johnston to see his work come to fruition during before he died.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nyt...uired.amp.html
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April 28, 2016
According to experts, the most difficult string quartet ever written is Ben Johnston’s Quartet No. 7. It was composed in 1984 but went unperformed for decades. Musicians who knew the score, with the ingenious palindromic structure of one movement and variations teeming with over a thousand microscopically distinct pitches, considered it well-nigh unplayable.
Now the work is available on a CD that the Kepler Quartet released hard on the heels of the composer’s 90th birthday in March.
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https://stringsmagazine.com/the-kepl...ton-recording/
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And the cycle is complete. After 14 years and more than 1,999 takes in the recording studio, the Kepler Quartet has fulfilled its mission and honored the core driver of its existence: They’ve recorded all ten of revered American composer Ben Johnston’s string quartets. A new album containing String Quartets Nos. 6, 7, and 8 was released in April, about a month after Johnston’s 90th birthday. The seventh and eighth are world-premiere recordings.
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Composer Ben Johnston
Performers Kepler String Quartet