Songs of Alkonost, Lera Auerbach’s String Quartet No. 5, takes its subtitle from Alkonost, a legendary woman-headed bird from East Slavic folklore. Her song is described as so beautiful that those who hear it forget everything else; the myth is also linked to Alcyone, the Greek figure transformed into a kingfisher.

The work is cast in one movement. Rather than unfolding as a sequence of separate movements, it gathers the quartet’s four voices into a continuous song-world: luminous, mythical, seductive, and inwardly dramatic.

A mythical song-bird becomes chamber music: beauty as enchantment, memory, and oblivion.

Commissioned by Staatskapelle Dresden as part of Auerbach’s Dresden residency as Capell-Compositrice 2011/12, the quartet received its first performance at the Semperoper in Dresden by the Shostakovich Festival Quartet.

Alkonost is a legendary woman-headed bird from East Slavic folklore. Her voice is so beautiful that listeners forget everything else. The work was commissioned by Staatskapelle Dresden for Auerbach’s Capell-Compositrice residency.

String Quartet No. 5 “Songs of Alkonost” follows the compact invention-world of String Quartet No. 4 “Findings — Sixteen Inventions” and turns toward a more mythical, image-bearing form. Its single movement is shaped around the symbolic presence of Alkonost: a figure of song, enchantment, radiance, and forgetting.

The work belongs to the chamber-music catalogue published by Boosey & Hawkes / Sikorski. As chamber music, it is presented here with official Boosey & Hawkes / Sikorski purchase and print-on-demand links rather than rental-material links.