This first volume in a series combining Radulescu’s complete Piano Sonatas and String Quartets on Mode, performed by the superb JACK Quartet and pianist Stephen...

This first volume in a series combining Radulescu’s complete Piano Sonatas and String Quartets on Mode, performed by the superb JACK Quartet and pianist Stephen Clarke was released earlier this year on CD. It has been greeted with great critical acclaim and sales. And so, a natural starting place for Mode to reenter the LP market. In the 1970s, Horatiu Radulescu (1942-2008) began exploring and composing begun composing what he called “plasmatic music,” in which sound was conceived as an “endless ocean of vibrations,” as opposed to the traditional way in which music treats sound as a fabric of discrete scale steps. His music is linked to the “spectral music” school. Radulescu’s Fifth String Quartet is one of the key works in his output. It is in some ways the richest manifestation of the body of string techniques he had developed for his music. The Fifth Piano Sonata makes abundant use — more so than any of the other sonatas — of Romanian folk material, which is absorbed and integrated into Radulescu’s spectral language.