B&B
Yun was always coming up with individual formal solutions for his works. One such solution was his variation of the number of movements, something he did in his symphonies a well as his string quartets. The two-movement String Quartet IV (1988) and the one-movement String Quartet V (1990) were concerned with unconventional approaches to processes of tonal blending. As in his Violin Concerto I (1981) and Symphony I (1982/83), however, Yun abided by the conventions of the quartet genre in his four-movement String Quartet VI and did so in his own unique language. The headings assigned to the four movements are also traditional in character Pesante, Giocoso, Lamentoso, and Animato.
Yun composed his String Quartet VI at the beginning of 1992 in Urberg in the Black Forest after a rather long period of iIlness. The Amati Quartet, its dedicatee, premiered it at the Basel City Casino on April 7, 1992. Yun begins by reflecting on his severe asthma in Pesante (5/4 time). The »burden« of chords in gliding descent and with fortissimo force is set over against the »light« of shorter, ascent motifs first in the viola and then in the second violin. The rhetorical, declamatory character of the music, with its ascending movement signifying liberation, is more important than the material here. The tenacious harmonic rhythm corresponds to the gradual healing process.
The harmony of the middle section is conventional: Yun expounds relatively static seventh chords in high registers, with trills and glissandi supplying characteristic blurring. His intention here was »to bring to melting the block of ice« of the chords symbolizing persistent illness.
Yun also makes elemental material speak in the Giocoso (4/4 time). The dance character of the »theme« draws on sextuplets and pizzicato octaves. Here he returns to a motif from »The Rabbit« (1985), a violin piece from Li-Na in the Garden, a cycle he composed for his grand-daughter. The jaunty swing of the music is revitalized and broken up by filigree ornamentation as well as by an extended sighing motif blurring the boundaries between the measures. In the contrast section he inverts the motif.
The Lamentoso (6/4 time) is perhaps one of the first of those extended slow movements in the late Yun which, as Heinz Holliger once formulated it, »know of the last things.« The breaking down of the chords of the first movement into a series of single tones marked »melancholy« creates an aura of stillness and standstill. Pleading upward gestures, then the laconic utterances of note repetitions, and soon their homophonic compression vaguely recall Shostakovich. In this ascent up into the higher registers Yun seems to want to touch heaven from the earth. Just before the end of the movement the musical material of the initial impulses undergoes motivic-thematic interlarding or interspersion on its way to the long-drown-out tone. Here the motivic structure points to something familiar and universal and conveys brokenness.
The Animato (4/4 time) is a perpetuum mobile, rich in contrasts and forms. The rhythmic-metric connections to what is at times an almost dance-like sort of correspondence rhythm stand out; otherwise Yun usually shies away from their unambiguousness. The intensification aims at dilution and dramatization, at the vital sound and life rhythm maintained in spite of numerous obstacles.
Walter-Wolfgang Sparrer (1996, translated by Susan Marie Praeder)