Jerusalem Quartet

From the opening funeral dirge of the Quartet No.1 to the incandescent frenzy that concludes the fifth, this disc offers a genuine panorama of the Bartókian universe. It's a world unto itself, constantly stamped with the heritage of Hungarian folklore so dear to the composer. Two years after a first volume devoted to the even-numbered works (Nos. 2, 4 and 6), the musicians of the Jerusalem Quartet expertly complete their recording of a key cycle of modern chamber music, a musical saga drawn on the scale of a lifetime.

By juxtaposing Leonid Desyatnikov’s contemporary song settings of Yiddish texts (offering a glimpse into Jewish life in Warsaw during the Weimar Republic) with a pair of chamber works by Schulhoff and Korngold, which also date from this troubled period between the wars, the present recording highlights the fascinating crosspollination then taking place in the music of Eastern and Western Europe. With soprano Hila Baggio as their featured soloist, members of the Jerusalem Quartet bid us “come to the cabaret” to savour a whole range of stylistic approaches and emotional experiences of the rarest kind.

The String Quartet in G minor of Claude Debussy and the String Quartet in F major of Maurice Ravel are frequently paired because of their formal similarities, their shared fin de siècle melancholy, and comparable technical demands, and they have been treated as companion pieces on numerous albums. Debussy composed his string quartet in 1893, and Ravel structured his work along similar lines, finishing it in 1903, so in spite of the decade that passed between the works, there was a conscious connection that was reinforced by the composers' mutual admiration.

Although the initial Harmonia Mundi release of the Jerusalem Quartet's performances of Haydn's string quartets was not described as the first volume of a series, the second volume is prominently labeled as such, suggesting that the first disc was so successful that label decided to release a follow-up to beef-up its Haydn catalog for the 200th anniversary of the composer's death in 2009.

Shostakovich - String Quartets - Jerusalem Quartet (2012) {2CD Harmonia Mundi HMG 508392.93}
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© 2012 Harmonia Mundi | HMG 508392.93
Classical / Chamber Music

A judicious coupling of Shostakovich recordings by the Jerusalem Quartet who have won BBC Music Magazine Awards no less than three times. “Vivid, profoundly intelligent accounts of six of Shostakovich's Quartets. The Jerusalems prove eloquent exponents of these works' tragic intensity and bittersweet lyricism.” - BBC Music Magazine, February 2013.

The eighteenth century is probably the most extraordinary period of transformation Europe has known since antiquity. Political upheavals kept pace with the innumerable inventions and discoveries of the age; every sector of the arts and of intellectual and material life was turned upside down. Between the end of the reign of Louis XIV and the revolution of 1789, music in its turn underwent a radical mutation that struck at the very heart of a well-established musical language. In this domain too, we are all children of the Age of Enlightenment: our conception of music and the way we ‘consume’ it still follows in many respects the agenda set by the eighteenth century. And it is not entirely by chance that harmonia mundi has chosen to offer you in 2011 a survey of this musical revolution which, without claiming to be exhaustive, will enable you to grasp the principal outlines of musical creation between the twilight of the Baroque and the dawn of Romanticism.