Abrahamsen: String Quartets CD review – definitive recordings of a vital series

Arditti Quartet
(Winter & Winter)Hans Abrahamsen’s string quartets span almost 40 years, virtually the whole of his career as a composer. The first, a set of 10 preludes, dates from 1973, and the second, cast, like those that followed, in a more conventional four-movement form, appeared in 1981. But it was then 27 years until the third, a period that included the long creative silence Abrahamsen endured during the 1990s.The Ardittis play the quartets in reverse order, opening with the