Die Streichstücke (2019) brings me back to chamber music writing after a long break and primary focus on large outside commissions and symphonic projects. As history proves, there is something magical about the string quartet as a medium – many times, it is the most fragile thoughts that are put into composers’ string quartets, often misunderstood, often ambiguous on purpose, often very challenging both technically and psychologically. As I resonate with this historical fact as well, I approached my Streichstücke to be my deep personal confession. In the second movement, I reached the point where I must have included an inevitable quotation of Shostakovich for not well-justified reason. Strangely enough, this happened to him as well in his 15th Symphony, where he quoted the leitmotif from Tristan und Isolde, explaining in a letter: “I don’t myself quite know why the quotations are there, but I could not, could not, not include them”.
This work had rather a convoluted process of its premiere performance – gathered recordings of the three movements from three different ensembles took almost a year for the full premiere of Die Streichstücke.