Byol

„Many Russian instrumental works of the 19th century were based on a programme, and the same holds true of Alexander Borodin’s Second String Quartet. Here the underlying subject was the great love he felt for his wife Ekaterina. In 1877, the composer (who was also a doctor and a chemist) travelled to Heidelberg, where he had met her 16 years earlier. In letters he described to her how he was returning to the spots they had visited together, and added: “I would give anything to have you here at my side.” Borodin finished writing the D Major Quartet on a date that was likewise symbolic: on 10 August 1881, their twentieth anniversary…“ (from the liner notes by Mathias Corvin)

„Of all the major Russian composers, Reinhold Glière is one of the least well known in the West. His life spanned a vast period from the Czar’s reign to Soviet dictatorship, and he made it through the Stalin era relatively intact by mostly avoiding conflict without losing face. Such dilemmas were to haunt the lives of Glière’s pupil Prokofiev, and especially that of his colleague Shostakovich, 30 years younger, but they were not yet current in 1900, when 20-year-old Glière, still a student, injected all of his youthful verve into composing his String Octet in D Major, Op. 5. The work soon gained immense popularity in Russia, where, still today, Glière’s Octet is sometimes even held in higher esteem than the likewise youthful and fresh String Octet by Mendelssohn.