Performance

String Quartet in D minor, Op. 56 'Voces Intimae'

1 upcoming performance in New York

Jean Sibelius’s String Quartet in D minor, Op. 56, known as “Voces Intimae,” is a compact, five-movement work from 1909, written during a period of illness and self-scrutiny. Its title points to inward “voices,” and the music often sounds like private argument rather than public statement, with spare textures and sudden shifts in temperature. In New York, it has long circulated among conservatories and chamber series as a touchstone of Nordic modernism, even without a single canonical local premiere story. At Alice Tully Hall, it sits naturally in a program of late-19th- and early-20th-century quartet writing, and it remains one of Sibelius’s most revealing scores.