Call from Afar (2 livres)

www.kindle project cd Eos Guitar Quartet

https://open.spotify.com/album/1VxyP5RVcN8OfOnGoo4WHp?si=6Ux2qB63THW4-UyTz38-Eg

This substantial work comes with a bound full score and a separate binder containing the parts, each twelve pages. One of the few editions from this fast-growing publisher to have English instead of French performance indications and instructions for preparing the guitar, this is a complex work from the Swiss composer Kindle. The first movement, Restlessness, involves two handed percussion and two handed guitar playing very evocative, and as the percussion evolves into notes, the dawn chorus build and builds, Gathering opens in 11/16 time again with tapping effects, and again evolves, this time through 9/16 to 4/4, with haunting melodies in the bass and motifs in parallel octaves high up the neck, The inner voices have lots of parallel thirds and sixths but these are comfortable, once the tiring change of reading alternative sharps and flats is overcome. Migration begins with an atmospheric lightly syncopated melody on the wound strings, with a rhythmic accompaniment and soaring harmonics above. Arpeggios and pizzicato develop the mood of this, a particularly «busy« movement. The «Night« is marked Adagio and peaceful harmonics and little fragments of music come and go like the night breeze, but there are strange rumblings and crashes, and the guitars embody a variety of strumming, scraping and pizzicato. Dawn, predominantly in 5/4 has a glorious mix of plucking (can I say that with birds around?), harmonics and pizzicato, and the workload is shared equally. As with all the movements except Night (which fades to nothing), this leads straight into the next movement... Home is subtitled «Final Dance Abukenke« (not everyone will know that there is a connection with Jurg Kindle's Percussion Number 4). A long and challenging movement this evolves into an explosive percussive piece, the connection with the Afro-Cuban Percussion Number 4 being strong. Not for the novice, but very evocative and modern rather than atonal. 

Derek Hasted (Classical Guitar Magazine)