Despite it's title, Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence, composed in 1890, owes more to the Russian tradition than to the Italian school. Full of strong contrasts, very intense, and extremely demanding for the performers, it is one of the cornerstones of the string sextet repertoire. Nine years later, with a vigor rivalling that of Tchaikovsky's work, Schoenberg composed another masterpiece of the genre, Verkl�rte Nacht. This dark and feverish musical tableau, inspired by Robert Dehmel's poem of the same name, takes Romantic expression to it's apogee. The Oistrakh Quartet, featuring four of today's most outstanding Russian musicians, is perfectly at home in these two great works, recorded with the violist Daniel Austrich and the cellist Alexander Buzlov.

Joseph Haydn was commissioned by a canon of Cádiz, José Sáenz de Santamaría, Marquès de Valde-Íñigo, to compose a work for performance on Good Friday 1787 in the city's Oratorio de la Santa Cueva. The result was the orchestral version of The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross, which Haydn arranged shortly afterwards for string quartet, a version that was to prove an enduring success. More recently, in 2008, the composer José Peris Lacasa, a student of Milhaud, Boulanger and Markevitch, provided a version for string quartet and soprano voice, with the latter singing the Latin text originally written by Haydn under the first violin part. Far from distorting the original piece, this version, performed here by the Prazak Quartet with the Irish soprano Helen Kearns, sheds new light on one of Haydn's great masterpieces.

Since their debut as a trio in 1986, Cenek Pavl�k, Marek Jerie and Ivan Kl�nsk� have ranked among the finest chamber musicians of their generation. Here, to mark thirty-five years of playing together, the Guarneri Trio Prague immortalise works by Haydn, while celebrating the composer's eternal youthfulness with all the expressive intensity and spirit that we have come to expect of them.

Classical Music