Peter Eötvös : The Sirens Cycle

The work of Hungarian composer and conductor Peter Eötvös is distinctive for its concern with narrative and the organic link it establishes between language and music. In this new quartet, Eötvös takes advantage of the expressive and “linguistic” power of strings, here accompanied by a voice. The Sirens Cycle is inspired by a short story of Kafka’s written in 1918. The sirens’ weapon is silence. “But Ulysses, if one may so express it, did not hear their silence; he thought they were singing and that he alone did not hear them” – Kafka. In the background one hears other sirens from Joyce and Homer: three languages, three books, for a “chamber opera”.

With the Calder Quartet