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DIESENDRUCK: Quartets 1+2
Pro Arte Quartet-Centaur 2412 (Qual) 53 min
Tamar Diesendruck is a young Israeli-American composer with degrees from UC Berkeley and Brandeis. Her debut recording reveals her as a postmodernist pasticheur who must have demonstrated a particular academic affinity for style-imitation assignments.
Her first quartet (1988) bears the rather juvenile title Such Stuff I (`Driven, unrelenting') is a fast-moving mess out of which threads of chromatic melody occasionally emerge. II (`In homage to Stravinsky') finds her trying out some of his milder neo-classicism. III ('Four simultaneous...