The brand new album by the Aizuri Quartet affords musical contemplations of earth and sky by 4 disparate composers.

Shervin Lainez/Courtesy of the artist

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Shervin Lainez/Courtesy of the artist

The brand new album by the Aizuri Quartet affords musical contemplations of earth and sky by 4 disparate composers.

Shervin Lainez/Courtesy of the artist

On its new album, Earthdrawn Skies, the Aizuri Quartet convincingly connects the dots in wildly various music stretching over eight centuries. There are moments of serene reverie, clamorous esprit and sober self-scrutiny, even a folks dance or two — but all of it is smart on a recording that capabilities as properly on paper because it sounds in observe.

Within the liner notes, the band factors to an mental theme that threads the album’s disparate items collectively. Earthdrawn Skies, it writes, is a showcase of “deep connections between humankind and the pure world by way of the distinct lenses of 4 composers forging private relationships with the soil and the celebrities.” Whereas that could be true — and interesting in itself — you do not want that data to listen to how properly the person works circulate naturally from one to the subsequent, like mixtape.

The opening, chant-like music by Hildegard von Bingen, the twelfth century abbess, visionary and scientific creator, units the muse that can help the album’s reflective temper. An association of her Columba aspexit affords a sedative drone, crystalline transparency and a beautiful meandering, lyrical line.

The ear-opening discovery on the album is unquestionably the String Quartet No. 1 by Eleanor Alberga, now in her early 70s and worthy as ever of a far larger stage of visibility. The music was impressed by a physics lecture whereby Alberga was shocked to study that every one matter, together with ourselves, comes from star mud. On the coronary heart of the piece is a tremulous but meditative central part, which the composer describes as “stargazing from outer area.” Rhythmically spasmodic flanking actions come off as so many luminous cosmic particles colliding to kind melodic cells, solely to burst aside once more.

Planting the listener solidly again on earth are 5 quick preparations of Armenian folks songs by the singer, instructor and ethnomusicologist Komitas Vardapet. They vary from bittersweet and lyrical ballades (“It is Cloudy”) to punchy hoedowns (“Dance from Echmiadzin”). You possibly can nearly scent the loamy soil in these pretty homespun items, composed within the early years of the twentieth century.

The ultimate work on Earthdrawn Skies brings us deep into the Nordic forest — and into the unsettled thoughts of the commemorated Finnish grasp Jean Sibelius, circa 1909. Determined to curb the composer’s heavy ingesting, Sibelius’ household devised one thing of an intervention: Transfer away from Helsinki, with its big-city temptations, and right into a newly constructed villa inside the large pine forests some 25 miles north. Right here is the place Sibelius wrote his solely mature string quartet, “Voces Intimae,” a subtitle that means an intimate dialog, maybe with oneself.

Whereas the general impact of this 30-minute quartet is all shadowy self-reflection, there are temporary flashes of nervous optimism within the two scherzo-like actions, performed with further zest by the Aizuris, and within the finale, which affords a whiff of folks fiddling. Nonetheless, the darkish soul of the quartet smolders in a brooding adagio which, close to its finish, reveals a grim soliloquy for the cello — an outline, maybe, of a tormented man looking for route.

In a bit over an hour, Earthdrawn Skies has achieved its work properly — arousing solemn contemplation, cosmic curiosity, folksy delight and introspective scrutiny.