Dystonia - サールウェル: 弦楽四重奏のための作品集

クリント・ルイン、フランク・ワント、フェトゥス…他、様々な名義で活躍するオーストラリアのミュージシャン、ジェイムズ・ジョージ・サールウェル。このアルバム・タイトル「Dystonia=ジストニア」は筋肉の不随意収縮を起こす症状を意味する言葉で、不協和音や不整脈、はたまた運命と様々な事象を連想させます。
弦楽四重奏で奏でられる各々の曲につけられたタイトルも印象的ですが、その音楽はバルトークやショスタコーヴィチを思わせる硬派なものです。
ナクソス・ジャパン

Composer JG Thirlwell may be best known as the creator of music for adult cartoons. Although the five contemporary works on Dystonia are cut from a completely different cloth than that, they perhaps share with cartoon scores a certain aesthetic of intensified excitement that is rendered well by the Mivos Quartet. Four of the five pieces suggest illness or phobia (the title of Apeirophobia, the final work, offers listeners a $64,000 vocabulary word meaning "fear of the infinite"). So does the title, Dystonia, meaning involuntary movements. Sharp, stabbing chords alternate with a more legato idiom that predominates in a couple of the shorter pieces (Narcolepsy is not the soporific piece that one might suppose). The Mivos Quartet specializes in the edgier forms of contemporary acoustic chamber music, and they are in their element here. Even listeners less sympathetic to contemporary music may find that these examples, with their feeling of overwhelming unease, resonate with their experiences. ~ James Manheim