Jerusalem Quartet

By juxtaposing Leonid Desyatnikov’s contemporary song settings of Yiddish texts (offering a glimpse into Jewish life in Warsaw during the Weimar Republic) with a pair of chamber works by Schulhoff and Korngold, which also date from this troubled period between the wars, the present recording highlights the fascinating crosspollination then taking place in the music of Eastern and Western Europe. With soprano Hila Baggio as their featured soloist, members of the Jerusalem Quartet bid us “come to the cabaret” to savour a whole range of stylistic approaches and emotional experiences of the rarest kind.

Robert Schumann - Piano Quartet op.47 / Piano Quintet op.44
Alexander Melnikov / Jerusalem Quartet
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 233 MB | Full Artwork: 106 MB | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Harmonia Mundi # HMC 902122 | Country/Year: France 2012
Genre: Classical | Style: Romantic, Piano

"These performances are notable for the blending of piano and strings into impeccably balanced textures. It’s an approach that’s better suited to the subtle Piano Quartet, a masterwork that owes much to classical models, than to the Piano Quintet. (…) These highly recommendable performances (…) join many other polished, modern accounts such as Takács/Hamelin and Mandelring/Le Guay that have been praised in these pages…" ~Fanfare

Although the initial Harmonia Mundi release of the Jerusalem Quartet's performances of Haydn's string quartets was not described as the first volume of a series, the second volume is prominently labeled as such, suggesting that the first disc was so successful that label decided to release a follow-up to beef-up its Haydn catalog for the 200th anniversary of the composer's death in 2009.

The String Quartet in G minor of Claude Debussy and the String Quartet in F major of Maurice Ravel are frequently paired because of their formal similarities, their shared fin de siècle melancholy, and comparable technical demands, and they have been treated as companion pieces on numerous albums. Debussy composed his string quartet in 1893, and Ravel structured his work along similar lines, finishing it in 1903, so in spite of the decade that passed between the works, there was a conscious connection that was reinforced by the composers' mutual admiration.