Madhares for string quartet (2006/07)

… a premiere which deserved every bit of the public’s enthusiastic applause. Thomas Larcher wrote his third string quartet, which is comprised of five movements, while on the coast of Crete. He named it after a mystical place called Madhares and turns the honey of Anopolis into sound in the second movement. He is neither afraid to use tonality nor to incorporate Greek folkloristic-inspired elements, but he combines these traditional parts with passages which are atonal, aleatoric, or even just noise with such masterful concision and confidence that a fascinating new and natural atmosphere, in the best sense of the word, is achieved.

One immediately wants to hear this masterpiece again. Anyone who has ever been to Crete, will suddenly be surrounded by the tangy fragrances of the South and inhale the aromatic island air while sitting in the middle of Salzburg. Of course, there is much more in it than mere atmospheric impressionism. There is frequently a mysterious opaqueness, sometimes an almost inaudible aggressive fervidness which is unusual in Larcher’s musical vocabulary, and then again a sound which arises out of the silence and fades away iridescently at the end. Many pieces in recent years testify to the renascence of the melody in contemporary music. That it should reappear so satisfyingly, with such vigor and an absence of eclecticism is an experience which is best expressed by the good old phrase ‘moment of happiness’.

Gottfried Franz Kasparek: The Melody Is Coming Back, and How!, www.drehpunktkultur.at, January 2008

[“Madhares”] is an extraordinary piece: it is rich in effects, and its language can be abstruse, even terrifying.

One section seemed to combine the avian swarm of Hitchcock’s “Birds” with the violin stabs in Bernard Hermann’s “Psycho” score. Yet these tense sections often melt into something entirely different – modal, folksy melodies, refracted through lightly dissonant harmonies, for example, or unabashedly shimmering Romanticism.

The score, inspired by the White Mountains of Crete, was both familiar and otherworldly, and left a listener eager to hear it again.

Allan Kozin: Capturing Shifts Between Ecstasy and Anguish, The New York Times, January 18 2011

[The Diotima Quartet] saved the best for last: the String Quartet No. 3 (subtitled “Madhares” for a mountainous area in western Crete), by Austria’s Thomas Larcher. Rather than expressing ideas and concepts, Larcher expressed landscape and emotion, which are so much easier for a listener to grasp at first hearing.

Five interconnected movements alternated mood and tempo. They also interwove references to 19th-century tonal music with explorations on the edge of string-instrument technique, including asking the players to make the strings vibrate eerily by rubbing coins along them.

Much of the music during the rest of the evening had an episodic, fragmentary quality. The composers all seemed to be searching for something.

They pushed the performers’ bowing and pizzicato skills. They dabbled in disjointed and non-continuous rhythm and tempo. They dipped our toes in polytonality and poly-dissonance.

But it took Larcher to show us how to connect new music with our hearts.

The Star, John Terauds: Quatuor Diotima looks like pop, but the sound’s cerebral, January 15 2011