Frozen Dreams, Lera Auerbach’s String Quartet No. 10, unfolds in six concise movements: Praeludium, Adagio molto, nostalgico sognando, Allegro ossessivo, Adagio tragico, Allegro moderato, and Postludium.

The work’s title suggests a landscape of suspended memory: dreams held in ice, images caught between motion and stillness. Its movement markings trace a concentrated emotional arc from prelude and nostalgic dreaming through obsession and tragedy toward a final postlude.

Frozen dreams: memory suspended between nostalgia, obsession, tragedy and after-sound.

Commissioned by Arizona Friends of Chamber Music and sponsored by Leonid Friedlander and Elena Landis, the quartet received its first performance at the Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival in Joplin by the Jasper String Quartet.

Frozen Dreams. A compact six-movement quartet of suspended memory and dream.

Arizona Friends. Commissioned by Arizona Friends of Chamber Music.

Jasper Quartet. First performed by the Jasper String Quartet.

String Quartet No. 10 “Frozen Dreams” follows String Quartet No. 9 “Danksagung / Thanksgiving” in Auerbach’s numbered quartet cycle. After the Beethoven-centered architecture and philosophical questioning of the ninth quartet, the tenth turns toward a more distilled sequence of dream-images and emotional states.

As chamber music, it is presented here with the official Boosey & Hawkes / Sikorski work and purchase pages rather than rental-material links.