Kongsgaard Variations

In his Kongsgaard Variations (2006), Swedish composer Anders Hillborg takes the Arietta-theme from Beethoven’s last piano-sonata, No. 32 in C minor Op. 111 as the basis for an evocative 16-minute string quartet. Beethoven’s sublime music drifts strangely through the centuries and is warped, vaporised, and refashioned as if, in the words of Hillborg, the Arietta ‘is dreaming yet another variation on itself’.