…Aybar thought to himself at the cusp of sunrise while penning the final note and marking the end of the four-day daze of all-nighter composing sessions as his equally insane pianist friend Huang kept him company in the practice room. The string quartet. The pinnacle of classical music. What was supposed to take 4 years, as his G Major quartet sat untouched for just as long, reduced to a mere 4 days. And the cause of this sudden burst of inspiration for a new E Major quartet, gentlemen? “To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise,” or in Aybar’s case, no music otherwise. Thus, we witness the bloom of an existential quartet, “Vardi”.

The first movement, Lento lusingado, opens with a chromatically diverging phrase between the viola and first violin, outlining a bloom. A tonal centre is finally established as the cello and second violin magically enter and create a majestic suspension. This is a movement that takes its time to express what it wants to say, with double stopped tremolos sparkling, as a subtle allusion to The Devil’s Trill, which the violinist had previously shown to Aybar.

The second movement, Vivacissimo scherzando, is a double hommage, combining references to the relentlessness of the second movement of Shostakovich's 8th quartet with the harmonic flavours of the caucus region.

The third movement, Prelude, Aybar’s first technically atonal movement (no real tonal centre is established throughout), attempts to coax the thorns of the rose, and resolve sharp-sounding augmented triads in six different ways, before landing on a fateful theme with allusions to a pivotal figure with a familiar namesake.

The fourth movement, Tema con variazioni, develops this familiar theme in a fever dream of variations. From serenity to unrelenting madness, Aybar loses track of his tonal centre in the same manner he loses track of his sanity. But a duet between the two violins where each and every note is pressed with a pleading suspension finally sees a return to perfumy E major. A perky pizzicato fugue brings us to an explosive climax where Aybar triumphantly dances himself into his own grave in a rapidly dazed alternation of Ⅰ and ♭Ⅵ harmonies.

Thus we emerge from the smoke of Aybar’s "Vardi" Quartet—a work forged not in the measured patience of years, but in the ashtray of four sleepless nights, each movement lit like another cigarette in the chain-smoked delirium of creation. Following the bloom and the thorn, the ecstasy and the torment, the suspended harmony and shattered tonality that mockedly reassembles itself, we are left with the aftertaste of Aybar’s predawn reckoning:  

“How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself?”

Yet in “Vardi”, we find the answer—not in virtue, but in vice transmuted. He is “extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering… That is a fact.”  “Vardi” is not merely heard. It is viscerally breathed in, toxic yet irresistible.