Nothing could be more stringent—or more breathtaking. In the rigorous space of avant-garde string quartets, no one remains untouched, especially not when the musicians of the British Arditti Quartet, which has been creating legends for forty years, are playing. What is more, a truly challenging triptych can be heard: over the past years, Clemens Gadenstätter, who teaches at the University of Music and Dramatic Arts in Graz, has composed three twenty-minute movements for string quartet which are conceived as an interconnected cycle.

It premieres at musikprotokoll 2020. That this will not be a particularly cozy hour but truly a rigorous cabinet of horrors for the ear can already be seen in the pictures that served as the three pieces’ inspiration: Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas, the crucifixion from Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, and Francis Bacon’s screaming popes.