Tchaikovsky Souvenirs: String Quartet No. 1; Album For The Young – Extracts; Souvenir de Florence

While we associate Tchaikovsky with music of virtuoso power and difficulty, sweeping up audiences with the fire of the Violin Concerto and First Piano Concerto, he also applied himself to music for the ever-growing market of amateur music-makers during his lifetime. Like many other great composers, he knew how to write for musicians of moderate ability without compromising or simplifying the individuality of his voice as a composer.

This second opus represents a return to Korngold’s roots, an attempt to rediscover the innocence and enormous artistic fertility that characterised the young composer. His first quartet and his piano quintet attest to an unbelievable talent and a visionary spirit rooted in the musical ferment of Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century. Beyond the fatigue one inevitably feels upon finishing a recording, we are suddenly aware of the distance we have travelled. Korngold’s music has transported us these last few years, but it has transformed us, too. This recording is our catharsis, a balm for the difficult years of Covid. Today, we realize just how lucky we are to be able to give concerts, to create encounters with audiences and to touch people through our recordings.

Composer Elena Ruehr has roots in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and studied with William Bolcom at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; the release of the Cypress String Quartet's How She Danced: String Quartets of Elena Ruehr finds Ruehr as a professor in the music department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Although not all of her four string quartets were written for it, Cypress String Quartet has enjoyed a long association with Ruehr going back at least to 1996, which is recapped to some extent in the engaging interview format booklet notes, led by Saint Paul Sunday Morning host Bill McGlaughlin and involving both the composer and all four members of Cypress.

The Borodin Quartet plays the music of its namesake as to the manner born. Theirs is a beautiful, lush realization of this lyrical work, polished and full of nuance, and well-served by the 1980 analog recording. The coupling with Borodin's First Quartet is especially attractive.

Karl Amadeus Hartmanns work is very difficult to attribute to any particular compositional school. Although he was not a revolutionist in terms of notation or performance forces, he was able to creatively subordinate all the achievements of modern musical language to innovative formal approaches. Hartmann wrote with extraordinary verve, creating artistic phrases with a broad ambitus, at the same time he could masterfully juggle short motifs, subjecting them to elaborate variational and contrapuntal transformations. In terms of harmonics, Hartmanns music is tonal, though strongly chromatic, which deprives the listener of a secure sense of anchoring in a specific key.