Carrillo: Complete Str Quartets Vol. 1 CD

The string quartets of pioneering Mexican composer Julian Carrillo offer a 60-year panoramic survey of his compositional journey, from late Romanticism to his admired microtonal works of the 1950s and 60s. String Quartets No. 5 and No. 6 from 1937 are part of a series of atonal pieces and hold the key to his future experimentation, sounding both mercurial and intricate, song-like and full of driving rhythms. No. 13, a collage-like work irradiated with a haunting Debussian aura, offers a synthesis of Carrillo's mature voice from 1964. The Momenta Quartet performed the first complete cycle of Carrillo's thirteen string quartets at Cornell University between 2015 and 2018.