Carlo Alessandro Landini (1954-)
"Changes", pour quatuor à cordes

Quatuor Arditti

Irvine Arditti, violon
David Alberman, violon
Garth Know, alto
Rohan de Saram, violoncelle

Very few contemporary composers are capable of creating music, or more precisely, “philosophical sound works”, in the manner of Carlo Alessandro Landini. The sensations evoked by his music in the listener are a continuous and incessant reminder of the concept of space-thought, of heart becoming mind. It teaches us that contemporary music, when one knows how to think, is a source of sentiment and emotion, and this quartet for strings from the early 1990’s with its evocative title (one is continuously aware of the “changes”) is a reassuring confirmation of the same. It is an extraordinarily complex work, multifaceted in its play between continuity and discontinuity, between form and content, and proposes a series of reflections that connect ideally to what has been said so far. The first of these would be to say that Landini is indeed fascinated by the space-time axiom; at once attracted and cowed by it.