Jeffrey Stadelman: 3 String Quartets

Composer Jeffrey Stadelman presents three string quartets on Navona Records, each offering distinct perspectives on his career and versatile style of composition. Performed by the New England String Quartet, these works illustrate the composer’s intense, lyrical, and sensuous modes of expression. Stadelman’s music is described as “bold, dramatic and compelling” (Audiophile Audition), and “immediately arresting and instantly commands attention” (MusicWeb International) Seraphita (Canons), the composer’s most recent work on this album, is a nine-movement canonic elaboration of the tune from the first song of Arnold Schoenberg’s Four Lieder, Op. 22 (1917) One of the composer’s few programmatic pieces, Eastland, was prompted by the tragic story of the 1915 Eastland disaster, in which a passenger steamship capsized in the Chicago River, drowning hundreds. This is an expressively straightforward piece that “aims to take its sardonic attitude to existential extremes,” using long glissandos and other devices to suggest the implacability, banality and blindness of fate.