Born in France in 1961, Nicolas Bacri has ploughed a lone furrow, assiduously avoiding allegiance to any current group of composers. Moving easily between tonality and atonality, the music is undoubtedly of our time, yet can be viewed as a historical continuation from Bartók. This disc covers the 16 years from 1989, and presents Bacri's rich store of tonal colours and interesting rhythmic patterns that offer the newcomer a key to unlocking his musical world.
The works present a formidable technical challenge to the young French based Psophos Quartet, particularly Sixth Quartet, in which the music dashes around the instruments in a feverish state of emotional anxiety. By contrast, the Fifth Quartet is often slow-moving, the long, flowing lines of the second movement and final Passacaglia relying on slight variants of quiet dynamics.
The Fifth uses Beethoven's Grosse Fuge as its starting point, with quotations from the original within its physically powerful frame, and the work's conclusion depicts the end of the time. It is very different from the disturbing harmonies that pervade the Third Quartet, written in memory of Zemlinsky.
Accuracy of intonation is at times open to question, but the deep commitment of the Psophos players, as they hurl themselves into the frenetic moments, cannot be doubted. Nor can their ability to create beauty in static passages be in any doubt – here the solo instruments show individual excellence. The recording is clean and clinical in texture and balance.
The 2007 release of Nicolas Bacri: String Quartets Nos. 3,4,5,6 finds Nicolas Bacri as one of the outstanding figures in contemporary French music, a composer who began his career in the 1980s as a serialist. While he hasn't exactly turned his coat inside out, Bacri is hardly a card-carrying member of the fraternity at this juncture – his music is clearly designed to elicit specific emotional responses and has a natural sense of flow and development, not to mention ample excitement and drama. There is never a sense anywhere in this music where the composer is saying, "Here are the elements the music is made out of, and there – is the result." Bacri's music is the sum total of contact with a wide range of influences and impulses, yet like Henri Dutilleux, his own voice is placed at the fore.
While Bacri has garnered acclaim for his work in a wide variety of genres, his cycle of string quartets – which remain in progress; String Quartet No. 7 having been premiered in 2007 - have elicited particular praise among. European critics. French label Ar Re-Se has made available Bacri's Quartets Nos. 3through 6, composed between 1985 and 2006, with the group Psophos Quartet. This is a fortunate match of artist and composer, as the Psophos plays as a matter of routine the quartets of composers to whom Bacri's music can be compared at least superficially – Berg, Bartók, Dutilleux and Webern are all in their standing repertoire.
Founded in 1997, the Psophos is a young quartet, and they play Bacri's music with all the strength, aggression and passion of youth. For those who like contemporary music in the "classic" twentieth-century style, yet prefer it not too aerodynamic and abstract, nor too minimal and cloying, Ar Re-Se's Nicolas Bacri: String Quartets Nos. 3,4,5,6 will be like a breath of fresh air. Moreover, anyone who loves string quartets really ought to hear what fireworks the Psophos Quartet can set off; this disc is both very thrilling and intellectually satisfying.
Diapason
January 2008
Nicolas Baron
After this recording of four of Bacri’s Quartets, among which the third and the sixth, which were completed in 1986 and 2006, the Seventh Quartet, commissioned for the latest Bordeaux Competition, will hopefully be recorded soon as well.
(…) Steeped in an ample tonality, the language is constantly oscillating between torment and bitterness, without ever settling down on one of these moods. Its eloquence comes from this back and forth movement which makes this piece akin to the post-romantic universe of the Transfigured Night or Webern’s Langsamer Satz (especially in the first bars of the Fifth Quartet).
In these brilliant pages dedicated to his favourite genre, the quartet, Bacri has found the right balance between a preserved personal language and the elaborated ideas which were at times missing in his earlier work. A melodic and harmonic inventiveness within a steadily thought-out but ever light silhouette make this work a success. In the Prologo of the Fourth Quartet, a swaying harmony generates a descending motif. The development then superimposes the harmony and the motif : the Leitmotiv is exposed to the changing beam of the chords, until it turns into the theme of Beethoven’s Great Fugue, which is the backbone of this hommage. The Psophos Quartet are familiar with Bacri’s music and excel in rendering its haze of sounds and its plaintive themes as well as the fury that makes these imagination-filled pages electric.
The 2007 release of Nicolas Bacri: 
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