The Four Elements

Brooklyn Rider describe The Four Elements as nothing less than “a musical call to attention”. The enterprising American string quartet’s superb players have chosen eight works composed between 1960 and 2023, a period of breakneck human-driven climate change and environmental degradation, and marshalled them under the headline titles of Earth, Air, Fire and Water, those essential building blocks of life that also hold boundless power to destroy. They begin with A short while to be here…, Colin Jacobsen’s homage to homespun wisdom, as preserved in the American folksongs he weaves into an uplifting evocation of a world in tune with Mother Earth. Tectonic plates, magnetic fields and the vibrating molten metals that flow beneath the Earth’s crust supplied the inspiration (as well as certain rhythms and pitches) for Dan Trueman’s Under My Feet & Up There, its two movements contrasting takes on the fragility of our planet’s interdependent ecosystems. Air finds its expression in the infinitely complex yet transparent sounds of Henri Dutilleux’s Ainsi la nuit (“Thus the Night”), a clear window into the conflicted human psyche, graced here with a performance of urgent eloquence and overwhelming intensity. Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8, his searing lament for souls lost to barbarous 20th-century totalitarianism, stands for Fire’s (and humanity’s) indiscriminate destructive appetite, while Akshaya Tucker’s heart-rending Hollow Flame turns to today’s burnt offering of forests, homes, lives and livelihoods laid waste by avoidable wild fires. Water is represented by two works that confront the catastrophic human delusion that we can command Nature. Undone, Conrad Tao’s shattering deconstruction of the myth of Undine, the water nymph invariably betrayed by her human lover, flows into Tenebrae, Osvaldo Golijov’s quiet call to turn from earthbound hatred and hostility to view our planet in its cosmological context, as “a beautiful blue dot in space”.