Our brand-new CD of Luciano Berio’s complete string quartets is hot off the press! It has been available since Friday March 14 in stores and on all online listening platforms. Follow this link for online listening or purchase.

We’re very proud of this disc, which is the first complete set of quartets by Luciano Berio, the famous Arditti Quartet having never recorded Study, Berio’s first quartet.

The 5 quartets follow the composer’s unique career path, with an early work for quartet entitled Study, written in 1952 and of a rather classical style. This was followed a few years later by Quartetto per archi, a work that belongs to post-Webernian music and generalized serialism. In 1964, Berio delivered Sincronie, a work in which gesture guides the music. The four instruments sometimes play synchronously, sometimes as if the music were random. Thirty years separate Sincronie from Notturno, Berio’s undisputed masterpiece. Murmurs, echoes, explosions of sound, this work is profoundly expressive and represents a pinnacle of 20th-century quartet writing. Berio concluded his quartet career with Glosse in 1997, a work written for the Borciani String Quartet Competition. Berio describes the work as “short comments on a virtual quartet or, more precisely, on a quartet that doesn’t exist – a rather complex and mysterious affair”.