Enigma is among the NY Times’s recordings of the year and on NPR Music’s list of “Top 10 Classical Albums of 2021”
Release date: August 27 2021 / Sono Luminus
Cover photo by Hrafn Asgeirsson (full booklet here)
Producer: Daniel Merceruio
Engineer: Daniel Shores
Graphic Design: Josh Frey
Tracks
1. Enigma, Movement I 11:77
2. Enigma, Movement II 7:54
3. Enigma, Movement III 9:14
Total duration: 28:25
“[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
“[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
Performed by the Spektral Quartet
Enigma was commissioned by the Spektral Quartet, Carnegie Hall, and Washington Performing Arts
Premiered by the Spektral Quartet at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. in October 2019
See here for more information about the work
See here for more information about the release on the SL website
Score preview - Enigma, Movement I
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.