Quatuor Meccore

Quatuor Danel, internationally celebrated for their interpretations of Shostakovich and Weinberg, present Sergei Prokofiev's rarely heard string quartets in a stunning new recording.

Programme intelligent que celui proposé par le Quatuor Varèse, tissant à rebours comme une lignée généalogique du quatuor à cordes au XXe siècle. […] Le Quatuor Arcadiana de Thomas Adès bénéficie une nouvelle fois d’une interprétation de belle facture […] Le jeu convaincant, précis, souple mais aussi tendu quand il le faut des Varèse convient bien à cette œuvre kaléidoscopique à la modernité tranquille. […] Le Quatuor de Ravel […], est abordé sans l’abattage ni la plénitude sonore des meilleures formations, mais avec la faculté de développer de vastes panoramas sonores d’influence impressionniste, notamment dans le premier mouvement. […] Les Varèse proposent néanmoins une vision personnelle qui se montre de plus en plus convaincante au fil des écoutes.

On the occasion of the bicentenary of Charles Gounod’s birth, this first complete string quartet (including two unpublished ones) on period instruments reveals an unknown part of his production, dominated by vocal music. Composer of the very end of the 19th century, Gounod and his five quartets are the worthy heir of the Viennese classicism tradition. The lyrical accents of the Quartet in G minor or the airy lightness of the Scherzo of the Petit Quatuor evoke nothing less than the names of Schubert and Mendelssohn. The musicians of the Quatuor Cambini-Paris (Julien Chauvin, Karine Crocquenoy, Pierre-Éric Nimylowycz and Atsushi Sakaï) gracefully reproduce these pages, full of gravity and sweetness.

Programme intelligent que celui proposé par le Quatuor Varèse, tissant à rebours comme une lignée généalogique du quatuor à cordes au XXe siècle. […] Le Quatuor Arcadiana de Thomas Adès bénéficie une nouvelle fois d’une interprétation de belle facture […] Le jeu convaincant, précis, souple mais aussi tendu quand il le faut des Varèse convient bien à cette œuvre kaléidoscopique à la modernité tranquille. […] Le Quatuor de Ravel […], est abordé sans l’abattage ni la plénitude sonore des meilleures formations, mais avec la faculté de développer de vastes panoramas sonores d’influence impressionniste, notamment dans le premier mouvement. […] Les Varèse proposent néanmoins une vision personnelle qui se montre de plus en plus convaincante au fil des écoutes.

After the success of their album Still Schubert, the Alfama Quartet, in its new configuration, records a new album devoted to the exacerbated romanticism in the music of Mendelssohn and Schumann.

When it comes to French string quartets, Autumn 2021 has been notably nocturnal-flavoured. First there was the superb “round midnight” from the genre’s rockstars, Quatuor Ébène – a programme of music for after dark that paired Dutilleux’s Ainsi la nuit of 1976 with a quartet arrangement of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (1899), bridged by a new jazz-infused work by the quartet’s cellist-composer Raphaël Merlin.

This new showpiece in the Collection Diotima, in which the eponymous quartet devotes itself to monographies of contemporary composers, offers here a triple line-up of some of the foremost composers of their generation: this album is a living image of serious music today, which in this 21st Century has focused on exploring the multifaceted realm of sound. Stefano Gervasoni (b. Italy, 1962), Gérard Pesson (b. France, 1958) and Enno Poppe (b. Germany, 1969) has each, in his own way, renewed the tradition and technique of writing for the string quartet.

Though not as well-known as his songs and operettas, the chamber music of Reynaldo Hahn (1874–1947) nevertheless includes some of his finest scores. It is thus not to be overlooked within his oeuvre, nor should it be considered subsidiary to his contribution to the musical theater. The present recording of the chamber music oeuvre of Reynaldo Hahn by the Quatuor Tchalik and Dania Tchalik on the piano is a project that coincides with the major retrospective, both musical and iconographic, on the Venezuelan-born French composer organized by the Palazzetto Bru Zane in 2019.

Quatuor Diotima makes it's Pentatone debut with a recording of Györgi Ligeti's string quartets. While the second quartet from 1968 is an avantgarde classic, the first from 1953-54, "Metamorphoses nocturnes", is often nicknamed Bartók's seventh quartet, pointing out the continuity between these two Hungarian master composers. Despite moments of nostalgia, it already possesses the ferocious, adventurous nature of the later quartet. In-between these two iconoclast works, the Andante and Allegretto from 1950 offers an intimate moment of repose.