Sirius Quartet Evans String Quartet No 1

Far from the dark, tortured image often associated with his music, the works on this album testify to an astonishingly serene period in Schumann’s life. A fine subject for this first album by the Hanson Quartet for harmonia mundi, whose members are partnered by Adam Laloum for a thrilling reading of a masterpiece of the Romantic repertory: the Piano Quintet.

Shostakovich - Complete String Quartets (CDs + Scores!) - Borodin Quartet
Classical | EAC: FLAC+Cue+Log | 6 Cds, Covers; 15 PDF | 2.21 Gb (CDs) + 39.8 Mb (Scores)
Label: Melodiya/BMG - Date: 1997

Rarely do we come across as intimate and wide-angled a set as this collection of Dmitri Shostakovich's 15 string quartets, all of them played by the Russian Borodin Quartet. Recorded in Moscow between 1978 and 1983, the quartets are excellently reproduced in digital sound by Sviatoslav Richter, who maintains just enough shadow from the old Melodiya vinyl's audio vérité to make the music breathe passionately…

Brahms's string quartets are among the composer's most "difficult" works, and they take a bit of effort to get to terms with. It has been said that inside them there are symphonies struggling to emerge, and to some extent one does get the feeling that Brahms was less than fully comfortable with the medium, that it provided restrictions more than opportunities and that the music is too large-scale in feel for the intimacy of chamber music.