Horațiu Rădulescu, who died in 2008 at the age of 66, remains little known in Britain. His music gets few performances here, though his place among the diffuse group of late 20th-century composers who sheltered under the banner of spectralism is firmly fixed. This is the first disc in a planned series that will include all of Rădulescu’s string quartets and piano sonatas; it frames the half-hour-long Fifth Quartet, completed in 1995, with a pair of more compact sonatas from 1991 and 2003. Yet despite the works’ chronological closeness, Rădulescu’s approach to the two genres seem to belong to different musical worlds.
While the quartet, subtitled “before the universe was born”, and carrying a quotation from a classic Taoist text on every page of the score, floats in an arrhythmic world of glassy harmonics and microtones, the sonatas, outwardly at least, are much more conventional. Parts of the Second Sonata, subtitled “being and non-being create each other”, have an Ivesian feel to them, and the Fifth Sonata, “settle your dust, this is the primal identity”, uses folk material from Rădulescu’s native Romania, before ending in a concatenation of bell-like sonorities. It’s all fascinating music, superbly played by both pianist Stephen Clarke and the Jack Quartet; Rădulescu’s work undoubtedly attracts devoted advocates.
