Lettres Intimes: Quartets by Bartók, Schulhoff & Janácek

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BARTOK / SCHULHOFF / JANACEK
Lettres Intimes: Quartets by Bartók, Schulhoff & Janácek
Quatuor Voce

[ Alpha / CD ]

Release Date: Monday 20 February 2017

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The Quatuor Voce, which recently celebrated its tenth anniversary, follows up its two recordings of Mozart with Juliette Hurel (ALPHA204) and Brahms with Lise Berthaud (ALPHA214) by inviting us on a journey to central Europe. The three works recorded here were written over a period of twenty years. Two of them allude to their composer's love lives. Bartók's First Quartet might be seen as Beethoven's Quartet no.17.

The intense opening Lento is a lyric-dramatic movement that transposes an unhappy experience of love. No previous quartet had come so close to the Beethovenian ideal. Janáček's Second Quartet reflects his love for Kamila Stösslová, and is a faithful mirror of emotions in all their spontaneous and constantly shifting authenticity. Schulhoff was one of the first Jewish composers to fall victim to Nazi barbarity. Inventive, omnivorously curious, he was a virtuoso pianist who performed both jazz and serial music. His Five Pieces consist of a suite of dances in different styles, successively Alla Valse viennese, Alla Serenata, Alla Czeca, Alla Tango milonga and Alla Tarantella.

GRAMOPHONE AWARD FINALIST 2013: Chamber

"Le Sage offers consistently limpid playing, so unmistakeably French...Everywhere the pacing sounds utterly natural: Le Sage and the Ebene are the most persuasive guides through sometimes daunting terrain. This is a clear front-runner in this repertoire."
(Editor's Choiice Gramophone March 2013)

In a genre set by Boccherini and represented in the nineteenth century by the masterpieces of Schumann, Brahms and Franck, Gabriel Fauré composed two scores that were very different from his early romances and the evanescent 'lullaby of death' that is the Requiem.

The Piano Quintet op. 89 remains little known, for reasons related to its composition as much as to its history. Regarded by Koechlin as one of Fauré's finest work, it serves as a transition to the composer's final stylistic period.

Opus 115, surprisingly less melancholy than its predecessor, is one of the composer's last productions. In the evening of his life Faure demonstrated his supreme mastery and prodigious creative power, giving French chamber music, which he served so well, one of its finest monuments.

Tracks:

Bartók:
String Quartet No. 1, Sz 40 (Op. 7)

Janacek:
String Quartet No. 2 'Intimate Letters'

Schulhoff:
Five Pieces for String Quartet