Over the past couple of years the excellent Minguet Quartett have been working their way through Wolfgang Rihm's string quartets, which rank alongside the five each by Ferneyhough and Elliott Carter as the most important contributions to the medium in the past half century. This fourth and final instalment of the cycle contains the two most recent (No 11 remains unfinished and unperformed), completed in 1997 and 2001 respectively, together with the un-numbered single-movement Quartettstudie, written two years ago.
Taken together, the three works show how vividly inventive and stylistically freewheeling Rihm's string writing can be - the three-movement 10th Quartet combines fierce pizzicato writing and bounced-bow passages with quotations from German folk song and the Italian baroque; the 12th moves in a wonderfully logical arc from immobility to rapid movement and back again; and the Quartettstudie explores the ways in which the four instruments can work in duos and as soloists without threatening the unity of the quartet as a group. It's compelling music, wonderfully played by the Minguet.