Carducci String

Continuing their project to record all the Shostakovich string quartets, award-winning artists the Carducci Quartet return to Signum Classics for their third album of string quartets by Shostakovich.

Of Philip Glass' conventionally scored chamber works, his String Quartet No. 5 is probably the best-known, in part because the Kronos Quartet and the Smith Quartet have given it first-rate recordings, but also because its more traditional approach and neo-romantic feeling hold a special attraction for a broad audience. This five-movement work has Glass' characteristic patterns and pulses, at least as they developed from his hard-edged, amplified minimalism of the 1970s to softer acoustic textures over the course of the 1980s, though the music is much more melodically contoured and expressive. This 2015 release by the Carducci String Quartet adds another title to the work's growing discography, and it is a wonderful performance by musicians who have a strong sympathy for Glass' idiom. It is programmed with the Suite from Dracula, a soundtrack Glass composed for the Tod Browning film, Dracula (1931), and Michael Riesman's arrangement of the Symphony No. 4, "Heroes," here presented as the String Sextet.

This CD marks the second release of the Carducci’s Shostakovich 15 project, which includes performances of the complete cycles of the Shostakovich Quartets in cities including Washington DC, London, Oxford, Cardiff, Bogota and concerts throughout the UK to mark the 40th anniversary of the composer’s death.

Julian Bliss joins the Carducci String Quartet in performances of two seminal works – Weber’s Clarinet Quintet in B flat Major, Op. 34 and Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A Major, K.581.

A year after honoring the band’s real-life namesake with a rock opera, Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson is giving a dozen of the group’s songs the string quartet treatment. Jethro Tull: The String Quartets, due out March 24 and available to pre-order now, finds Anderson working alongside the Carducci Quartet and arranger/conductor John O’Hara to recast a dozen Tull tracks in a new light.

Classical guitarists Peter and Zoltán Katona have pleased many with music ranging from Bach to Piazzolla, often in their own arrangements.