Beethoven String Quartet

As a viola player and dedicated chamber musician, Sally Beamish has had ample opportunity to acquaint herself with the string quartet genre. The Beethoven C minor Quartet on this disc she first played when she was 14. Thirty years later, when commissioned by the Brodsky Quartet to write a work inspired by Beethoven's Op. 18, this is the one that caught her imagination. The result is String Quartet No.2, composed immediately after a visit to California in 2000. Inspired by two bridges – Golden Gate in San Francisco and a Californian rock formation called Natural Bridges – Beamish uses themes …….

Like many musical projects planned for 2020, the plans of the Ehnes Quartet to record Beethoven’s late quartets underwent a drastic revision. Rather than cancel the project, some ingenious technology was employed. James Ehnes takes up the story ‘Our quartet was greatly looking forward to a week of recording in the United Kingdom in August 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible for us to travel to the UK, and for our UK-based producer, Simon Kiln, to travel to us. We were, however, able to take advantage of the wonders of modern technology by recording in the USA with Simon (producer Simon Kiln) monitoring the sessions in real time in London A fortunate benefit of not traveling overseas for these recordings was that the days we had scheduled for travel become additional recording days, allowing us to record all of Beethoven’s string quartets from Op. 74 onwards. The four CD’s we recorded during this intense two-week period will always be treasured reminders for us of a brief, bucolic window of artistic fulfilment during a terribly challenging period for the world’.

Originally written as the finale of the quartet op. 130 and, in fact, finale of the set dedicated to Prince Galitsin (opp. 127, 132), the “GROSSE FUGE” (the Great Fugue) ends today the complete set of Beethoven's string quartets, providing its crowning moment as formally rigorous as deeply human by its search for absolute.

The debut disc of the Voxpopuli Quartet incorporates the best from the repertoire of the Mozart and Beethoven series. Mozart's Adagio & Fugue, inspired by the writing of Bach who greatly impressed the composer, comes in a slow and solemn part, followed by a fiery movement where the voices of the four instruments intersect in a bewildering harmony. Beethoven’s Op 132 Quartet, written when he had just seen death up close, is a declaration of war on destiny, a war Beethoven knows is lost in advance. The second movement, a monument to classical music, is a long tribute to the hypnotic and overwhelming “healing gods”.