Gewandhaus Quartet

On the tenth CD I would like to give you the opportunity of becoming familiar with the styles of interpretation of Bethoven employed by the earlier Gewandhaus-Quartett line-ups.
One of the oldest recordings in existence of this ensemble dates from the year 1916. The Gewandhasu-Quartett of that time performed Beethoven's String Quartet in C sharp major, op. 131 in the line-up of Edgar Wallgandt and Karl Wolschke (violins), Carl Herrmann (viola) and the unforgotten Julius Klengel (violoncello).

In celebration of Herbert Blomstedt’s 90th Birthday in July 2017, Accentus Music releases a new Beethoven cycle that captures the spirit of the long-standing partnership between the legendary conductor laureate and the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig. All nine symphonies, released in a box set containing five CDs, are live recordings made at the Leipzig Gewandhaus between May 2014 and March 2017.

Charles Ives’s innovations, his seemingly cluttered experiments, his use of quotation (from indigenous folk-tunes to Beethoven’s Fifth!) and his visionary ability to suggest and collide his childhood (Holidays Symphony) and look beyond ourselves (The Unanswered Question) has his detractors seeing him, at best, as eccentric. This CD brings maximum contrast from the off – first comes the 90-second Scherzo, gnarled and angular, from a European acolyte of radical Schoenberg maybe, which is followed by the hymnal opening of the First Quartet, music that became the third movement of Ives’s remarkable Fourth Symphony, and which could easily have been composed by Dvorak in America, save the harmony wouldn’t have ’slipped’ so much! This Quartet, completed in 1902, is in the conventional four movements.

Since its formation in 1969, the Raschèr Saxophone Quartet has appeared regularly at the major concert halls in Europe, Asia and the U.S.: Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center New York, Kennedy Center Washington D.C., Opera Bastille Paris, Royal Festival Hall London, Philharmonie Cologne, Finlandia Hall Helsinki, Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Schauspielhaus Berlin, Musikverein Vienna, Tonhalle Zürich, Parco della Musica Rome, Dewan Filharmonik Petronas Kuala Lumpur, National Concert Hall Taipei, etc. The Vienna “Zeitung” hailed the quartet as the “Uncrowned Kings of the Saxophone” and a critic from “Die Welt” claimed, “If there were an Olympic discipline for virtuoso wind playing, the Raschèr Quartet would definitely receive a gold medal.”

"How Anton Rubinstein in the end succeeded in creating a comprehensive oeuvre covering all the genres while making breathtaking concert and traveling rounds as a pianist is something that numbers among the incomprehensibilities of his life marked by a tireless work ethos. During the course of his busy life on the go he composed more than a dozen operas, six symphonies, an oratorio, a ballet, some two hundred songs, countless works for piano solo and for piano in the concerto style and with orchestral accompaniment, and chamber music for various formations with and without piano. He also composed ten string quartets, two of which are now being released on cpo. Rubinstein composed these works during his time in Leipzig, and the Reinhold Quartet, whose members are musicians of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig, offer powerful interpretations of them. The two Quartets Nos. 1 and 3 in minor keys from op. 47 are on the one hand subtly linked together motivically and on the other hand most highly different in design."