To celebrate its twenty years of existence, the internationally acclaimed Cuarteto Quiroga returns with its new album Atomos: The Art of Musical Concentration – their 7th release in Stereo, 5 Channel Surround and Binaural DSD at NativeDSD. This album represents a personal tribute to the genre and its literature from its origins to the present day, offering a unique perspective.

The album “ATOMOS” features works by three of the most important and historically influential composers in string quartet history: Joseph Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Béla Bartók. Additionally, it includes a world premiere recording of “Secreta,” a recent masterpiece by one of the absolute greatest living composers of our time, György Kurtág.

The aim of “ATOMOS” is to illustrate how these composers, in their pursuit of the nucleus of musical expression, sought to compress sound to a particle incapable of further division—an atom (ἄτομος)—giving birth to some of the most striking musical achievements in this exceptional repertoire. The ability to convey a lot in a short space of time while maintaining idiomatic subtlety and constructing a complete narrative structure is indeed a quality of extraordinary and transformative rarity. This concision enhances the strength of the message, making compression the most genuine gesture of revolutionary vision in linguistic, narrative, and poetic terms. Brevity, in this context, enhances the eloquence of the message.

Throughout this fascinating journey into the art of musical concentration, these four extraordinary composers reveal, through the works recorded here, what is most remarkable in music and life—the ability to pare oneself down to the minimal essence and allow the music to speak for itself with the most persuasive eloquence and the most moving kind of beauty.

Cuarteto Quiroga
Aitor Hevia – Violin
Cibrán Sierra – Violin
Josep Puchades – Viola
Helena Poggio – Violoncello

Recording Session Video by NativeDSD’s David Hopkins & Jonas Sacks