Brentano String Quartet, Ashley Bathgate, Lisa Moore, Elly Toyoda More Essential Martin Bresnick꞉ The Planet on The Table

Protean Quartet, winner of the prestigious first prize at the 2022 York Early Music International Young Artists Competition, explores the String Quartet repertoire of the second half of the XVIII Century, from the last of the so-called “Russian Quartets”, by Franz Joseph Haydn, to Beethoven’s Op. 18 No.1, the first of his String Quartets to be published, but already a masterpiece of the repertoire. The album also includes the first recording of Juan Pedro Almeida’s Quartet op. 7 no. 1. Protean Quartet, performing on period instruments and historically informed criteria, delivers refined, vital, and highly expressive performances.

Founded in 1992, the New York-based Brentano Quartet is known for its interpretations combining perfect technique and matchless musicality. Those qualities are even more obvious in this series of late Beethoven quartets with this first volume bringing together the Op. 127 and 131. This pure crystal of intelligence and brilliance will doubtless constitute a milestone.

For newcomers to the work of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, this generous two-disc collection of performances from EMI's archive would be a good place to start exploring. The authoritative Pärt performances would probably be the premiere releases on ECM, produced by Manfred Eicher, but these performances are all of a very high quality and there is a handful of works that ECM has never recorded. Pärt's most famous works are here; there are three versions each of the ever-popular Fratres (for violin and piano, string orchestra and harp, and string quartet) and Summa (for mixed voices, string orchestra, and string quartet), as well as the version of Spiegel in Spiegel for violin and piano, Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten for string orchestra and bell, and the concerto for two violins and prepared piano, Tabula rasa.

Few chamber music groups have as proud a history as the Smetana Quartet, or a history that evokes as much nationalistic passion. Founded during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, the group's very existence was an anomaly during an era when any manifestation of Czech nationalism was outlawed. They survived into the post-Nazi era, and went on to an acclaimed international performing career, making some of the finest chamber music recordings of the 1950s and 1960s…