Enigma (2019)

[Enigma] resembles dispatches emerging from the white noise of another world. It’s a masterly entrance to the genre, and a deceptively vast soundscape conjured with just four acoustic instruments.

Anna Thorvaldsdottir's mesmerising score emphasises the scope and scale of sound, exploring the seemingly unlimited timbres of a string quartet. Multiple extended techniques ... are sensitively integrated into traditional use of pitch, and pose no issue for the intrepid Spektralists. ... Impressive production captures this half-hour work in its best light. 

"[W]hile the Icelandic composer has made the symphony orchestra her own, her chamber music is cut from the same cloth and somehow sounds with much the same combination of immensity and intimacy. ... [T]he extent of her colour-derived thinking is thrust into focus by the bare bones of the string quartet. We hear the transformation of a single string note from harmonic to scratch to col legno, passing through everything in between. Fundamental sound is never not altering before our ears." 

...quite simply a magnificent achievement and a major addition to the string quartet repertoire ... she explores states in constant flux, asking when noise becomes sound, when sound becomes music, and what imbues her music with the huge emotional heft that it wields. ... a mesmerising, cathartic performance....

You’re bowled over by Thorvaldsdottir’s imagination, and by the playing of Chicago’s Spektral Quartet... A terrific disc, and one of the best contemporary releases of the year.

Describing Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir's Enigma – her first string quartet – is not easy, but imagine you’re suspended in some primordial gas cloud where matter is transforming, regenerating, building toward the birth of a planet.

...this is no mere collection of eerie sound effects — Enigma evolves as the mysterious noises gradually blend into the chordal structures. In the third movement, particularly, multiple layers of sound spin centripetally into harmoniously stable grounds, only to ebb away at last into the pitchlessness of the opening. With that deceptively simple approach, [Thorvaldsdottir] upends the string quartet genre and takes the listener on a nearly psychedelic trip into the unknown.

As I sat in silence, it felt as though mind and body had begun to vibrate in some different dimension. I cannot recommend Thorvaldsdottir's music highly enough."

...a powerful and assured statement from a composer who clearly knows what she wants to say. I found what she has to say gripping and, at times, moving in its plain-spoken simplicity.

Thorvaldsdottir teases additional mystery from the strings, masking them until at times you’d swear you were hearing electronic instruments, or a wind ensemble or percussion. ...Like other pieces of Thorvaldsdottir’s I’ve heard, “Enigma” sits on the border between concert music and installation art; it marshals sounds in ways that have little to do with the conventional pathways of Western classical music. ...Opening with a low, whistling rumble, like white noise through a speaker, it hardly leaves any sound unmodified. Even the few pure notes it allows the violin are transformed into swallowed, stifled whispers by the end of a phrase. It’s not something you want to describe using musical vocabulary; talking about col legno, the use of the wooden part of the bow to create a quiet, sexless sound, is less pertinent than comparing the experience of the piece to walking along a windswept seashore, looking at what the tide has exposed.