Enigma

For string quartet
Duration 27 min.

For upcoming - as well as past - performances, please click here

Commissioned by the Spektral Quartet, Carnegie Hall, and Washington Performing Arts
Premiered by the Spektral Quartet at Kennedy Center's Terrace in Washington, D.C. on October 29, 2019

World premiere recording by Spektral Quartet, recorded and released by Sono Luminus, out on August 27 2021

Enigma was among the NY Times’s recordings of the year and on NPR Music’s list of “Top 10 Classical Albums of 2021”

Full recording: Apple Music / Amazon / Spotify / Bandcamp

Selected reviews:

“[Enigma] resembles dispatches emerging from the white noise of another world. It’s a masterly entrance to the genre, and a deceptively vast soundscape conjured with just four acoustic instruments.” - New York Times

“Thorvaldsdottir’s mesmerising score emphasises the scope and scale of sound, exploring the seemingly unlimited timbres of a string quartet.” - BBC Music Magazine

“In the Spektral Quartet’s final major event, the group bade farewell in March with a remarkable contemporary work. Commissioned by the Chicago-based ensemble, Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Enigma is the first string quartet masterpiece of the 21st century—epic, mysterious and unsettling…” - Chicago Classical Review

“[W]hile the Icelandic composer has made the symphony orchestra her own, her chamber music is cut from the same cloth and somehow sounds with much the same combination of immensity and intimacy. … Fundamental sound is never not altering before our ears.” - Gramophone

“[Enigma] sounds like no string quartet you’ve ever heard… It’s wonderful work.” - Washington Post

“[Q]uite simply a magnificent achievement and a major addition to the string quartet repertoire ... It’s a mesmerising, cathartic performance, captured in close, authentic sound.” - The Strad

“Describing Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir's Enigma – her first string quartet – is not easy, but imagine you’re suspended in some primordial gas cloud where matter is transforming, regenerating, building toward the birth of a planet. … The performance, by the Spektral Quartet, makes the music feel vast and intimate at once.“ - NPR

“"Einzelne Töne, Linien und Akkorde, die aus knarzenden Geräuschen oder fahlem Rauschen herauswachsen und wieder von ihnen aufgesogen werden, lassen die halbe Stunde in einem Stadium fortschreitender Hörmeditation vergehen, die einmal mehr zeigt, was alles mit dem Streichquartett auch noch im 21. Jahrhundert möglich ist – welche Kraft in diesem Kontext von einzelnen Intervallen und Klangkonstellationen ausgeht.“ - neue musikzeitung

Program notes
The music of Enigma is inspired by the notion of the “in-between”, juxtaposing flow and fragmentation. Pulsating stasis - the “whole”, an expanding and contracting fundament - is contrasted with fragmented materials - shadows of things that live as part of the whole. Harmonies emerge and evaporate or break into pieces in various ways, leaving traces of materials that project through different kinds of textures and nuances and gradually take on their own shape. Some return to the core, some remain apart. Throughout the piece, the perspective continuously moves between the two, the fundament and the fragmented shadows, but the focus is always their relationship - the “in-between”.

As with my music generally, the inspiration behind Enigma is not something I am trying to describe through the piece - to me, the qualities of the music are first and foremost musical. When I am inspired by a particular element or quality, it is because I perceive it as musically interesting, and the qualities I tend to be inspired by are often structural, like proportion and flow, as well as relationships of balance between details within a larger structure, and how to move in perspective between the two — the details and the unity of the whole.

Score preview - Enigma, Movement I