[Their Beethoven performance's] were shockingly deep. I've never heard a quartet so young get so inside this ultimately inscrutable music LA Times The Calidore Quartet return to Signum Classics for the first instalment of their Beethoven Cycle: a 3-volume set of The Late Quartets. Their interpretation is informed by their diverse set of mentors which include Alban Berg, Emerson, Guarneri and yet still uniquely representing the sentiments, aesthetics and research of their generation. Their interpretations of Beethoven are already critically acclaimed with future performances planned at prestigious venues to be announced.

Novak's complete quartets for the first time in the anointed hands of the Stamic Quartet For an impressive forty years, the Stamic Quartet (established in 1985) have been enjoying countless international successes both in concert performances and studio recordings. Just during the last fifteen years, the Supraphon label has released albums of the ensemble featuring the first recordings of the complete works for string quartet by J. B. Foerster (2010), Sofia Gubaidulina (2012), and Karel Kovarovic (2019). For the Stamic Quartet's fortieth anniversary, they have recorded this complete set of Vitezslav Novak's quartets, which also definitely completes the ensemble's remarkable list of recordings. Nearly forty years separate the First Quartet by Dvorak's 29-year-old pupil, inspired by the countryside of Moravia and Slovakia and by folk music, from the Third Quartet, with it's anxious premonitions of war. The works demonstrate a considerable stylistic shift in the composer's musical language. From the foundations of the musical traditions of Romanticism, through inspiration from Moravian and Slovak folklore, Novak arrived at a personal style with integral components including the church modes, the sonic world of Impressionism, a polyphonic sensibility for musical structure (as is clear from the extensive fugue of the Second Quartet), and rhythmic richness. The experienced Stamic Quartet is the first ensemble to record Novak's complete quartets, and it has done so with commitment that would be the envy of many young ensembles.

Inspired by Isaiah Zagar, award-winning mosaic mural artist of Magic Gardens in Philadelphia, my thanks are given with this composition for Zagar's montage of humankind's mutual celebration of life, creativity, human experiences of justice, love, joy, emotional health, knowledge, and beauty; and for insights into the nature of expression and of being. Music's eternal quality is it's capacity for change, transformation and renewal. I am honored and thrilled to have received to a Musical Fund Society McCollin Commission and send my gratitude to the Fund and to the Rolston String Quartet for their commitments to music's renewals. Movement #1 is in celebration of Naava and Sanford Grossman. Movement #2 is in celebration of Jeanne Guillemin.

The third and final instalment in their award-winning series, the Calidore Quartet return with a three-disc release of Beethoven Early Quartets. Their previous Beethoven recordings have been described as 'highly collectible' by BBC Music Magazine. The first album of Late Quartets won the Chamber Music Award at the BBC Music Magazine Awards 2024, and the second awarded Recording of the Month by Gramophone Magazine. The contents of this recording project serve as a snapshot of their fourteen years of working, growing, listening and collaborating together. "Our interpretation speaks to the influences of our teachers and the great traditions associated with this repertoire, but also to that of our own generation, contemporary research, style and experience. Though this music speaks in a language that is hundreds of years old, it's message remains immediate, relevant and comforting to listeners of today and of generations to come even, and especially, in the most challenging of times". Their interpretations of Beethoven are already critically acclaimed with performances at the Lincoln Centre planned as part of their residency.

Finnish composer Kalevi Aho has produced a considerable and varied body of work that continues to grow rapidly. Aho first tackled the genre of string quartet at the very beginning of his composing career, more than fifty years ago, and has only recently returned to it. Aho was only 18 when he completed his String Quartet No. 1 in 1967. Self-taught at the time, Aho took his inspiration from the essentially tonal music he played on the violin or heard on the radio. The Second Quartet was composed in 1970, during his second year of studies at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki with Einojuhani Rautavaara and uses fugue technique in each of it's movements. The first performance of the quartet received excellent reviews and marked a minor breakthrough for Aho as a composer. The Third Quartet dates from the following year and marks the end of Aho's studies with Rautavaara. In this work Aho's personal language begins to emerge, although the influence of Shostakovich can also be heard. The work was a great success and has been performed more often than any of his other chamber compositions. The three string quartets are performed here by the Stenhammar Quartet, one of Scandinavia's leading string quartets, whose extensive repertoire gives prominence to contemporary music from the Nordic countries.

Haydn's originality, wit and esprit are once again as impressive as the striking inventiveness and versatility of this highly acclaimed ensemble. If his opus one marks the birth of the genre, then opus 33 marks the rebirth, containing some of his most inspired and innovative music. Haydn skilfully plays with the listener's expectations by offering lots of surprising twists and the Leipzig String Quartet reveal and revel in the delights of Haydn's musical wit and invention.

This recording contains two compostions by Welsh composer Matthew Owain Jones, String Quartet No. 1, 'Deletia' and Wind Quintet along with his arrangement of nine movements from Carl Nielsen's ballet Aladdin, Op. 63 for chamber ensemble. All three works on this album are premiere recordings and performed by Denmark's leading chamber ensemble Ensemble MidtVest. Jones is widely regarded as a unique, visionary musician and educator. Alongside composition, Jones is one of the leading violists and violinists of his time, recording 25 solo and chamber albums to date, premiering numerous concertos and commissioning dozens of works.

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When the Quatuor Ysaye dares... Twelve concerts LIVE in Paris! Played without a safety net at the Auditorium of the Musee d'Orsay! These were the conditions needed to recreate the uncompromising universe of the Beethoven quartets, a true musical Everest. Here, at the very peak of it's art, the Quatuor Ysaye offers the final dazzling demonstration of the unique rigour and sensibility that for thirty years marked it out as one of the finest in the world.

Taneyev: String Quartets Nos. 1 & 4

With this latest volume in their ongoing cycle, recorded in 2023, the Quartetto Nous passes the halfway mark of Shostakovich's 15 quartets. The previous instalments have been recognised and praised for their full-blooded intensity and uncompromising address to the detail of these absorbing scores. The present album returns almost to the start of Shostakovich's quartet cycle, with a piece which he claimed (perhaps as a joke) he had originally written as his Second Quartet, before adding a piano part to make it a Piano Quintet with which he could tour and earn much-needed income. At any rate, the Piano Quintet took shape in 1940 and soon became one of his most popular pieces of chamber music: less radical in form and harmony than most of his quartet writing, more extrovert in mood, and more approachable. The Second Quartet proper was composed in 1944, soon after the Leningrad Symphony which had won the composer international celebrity. Yet the two works exemplify the contrast in style between Shostakovich's 'public' and 'private' works. The Waltz of the Second Quartet is one of the most extraordinary examples of his ability to transform instrumental writing into a kind of nightmare factory. Having begun in a determined A major, the Quartet closes in a much more equivocal minor. The Fourth Quartet of 1949 likewise sets out in an almost folksy D major, working in elements of Yiddish melodies, and it's skies gradually cloud over during the four movements, until the sadness of the second movement and the vitality of the third fuse to produce the violent, wailing and screaming tones of a danse macabre in the complex finale. By the time of the Sixth Quartet, written in 1955, Shostakovich had become a practised exponent of double-edged rhetoric, of music which wears a happy face while twisting it's hands in anxiety or even agony. The serene light of G major bathes the initial Allegretto, but there are signs of grief, perhaps occasioned by the recent death of his wife Nina, scattered throughout the composition. The Quartetto Nous (from the Greek: intellect, mind, but also inspiration, creative capacity), has established itself among the most interesting musical Italian ensembles of it's generation, giving captivating interpretations in which the Italian tradition of string-playing merges with other significant European schools such as the Musik Akademie in Basel (where they studied with Rainer Schmidt of the Hagen Quartett), and the Accademia Chigiana in Siena (Gunter Pichler of the Alban Berg Quartett). Winner, among other awards, of the Farulli Prize in the Abbiati competition, the most prestigious award of Italian music criticism, the Quartetto Nous demonstrate their individual approach to music spanning the quartet repertoire, and in ambitious contexts such as playing from memory and totally in the dark. - The new installment of the complete String Quartets by Shostakovich played by Quartetto Nous brings together the quartets 2, 4 and 6, as well as the impressive and moving piano quintet. - Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) is without doubt one of the most famous and influential composers of 20th century Russia. He lived in a time of Soviet repression and, though outwardly a loyal communist, he resented the restrictions imposed by the regime on his creativity. This led to a fascinating duality between conformism and the expression of his most innermost feelings, fears and anger. - Shostakovich's 15 String Quartets form an impressive body which follows the development of his style throughout his life. They are the testimony of a tortured soul struggling to remain true to himself, expressed in anguish and bleakness, but also in serenity and bliss. - Quartetto Nous, formed in 2011, has established itself in a short time as one of the most interesting chamber music ensembles of it's generation. It's immersive performances are the result of a professional training where the Italian tradition and the most influential European schools are combined. The quartet studied with the Quartetto di Cremona at the Accademia Walter Stauffer in Cremona, at the Basel Musik Akademie with Rainer Schmidt (Hagen Quartet), at the Escuela Superior de M�sica 'Reina Sofia' in Madrid and at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena with Gunter Pichler (Alban Berg Quartet) and at the Lubeck Musikhochschule with Heime Muller (Artemis Quartet). - The first volume of the Shostakovich Quartets by Quartetto Nous for Brilliant Classics was hailed enthusiastically by the press. Musicweb writes:" This is one of the best as it left me in awe of the breadth as well as the intensity of Shostakovich's genius, RECORDING OF THE MONTH".

Schubert Vol. 3 Looking ahead to 2028 and the 200th anniversary of the composer's death, the Alinde Quartet will annually release a disc of Schubert string quartets for the next eight years, alongside a specially commissioned work. Finding the ideal sound world for Schubert's quartets is by no means easy, yet the Alinde strikes a near-ideal balance between internal clarity and textural warmth, shone through by sparkling intonation.

Vagn Holmboe (1909-96) stands as one of the greatest 20th-century composers of string quartets, with a monumental series of 21 quartets demonstrating his distinctive metamorphosis method. Holmboe's vibrant and organic quartet works are profoundly rooted in a Buddhist inspired perspective on life, an outlook which, though he kept it private, led him to view all manifestations of life as part of a cosmic whole. Equally essential is the influence from folk music. This third volume of the acclaimed Nightingale String Quartet series captures Holmboe at the peak of his creativity, with his musical metamorphosis practice fully flourishing.

The second in their award winning series, the Calidore Quartet return with a three disc album of the Middle Quartets. Their Beethoven performances have been described as 'shockingly deep' by LA Times. The first album of Late Quartets won the Chamber Music Award at the BBC Music Magazine Awards 2024. Their interpretation is informed by their diverse set of mentors which include Alban Berg, Emerson, Guarneri and yet still uniquely representing the sentiments, aesthetics and research of their generation. Their interpretations of Beethoven are already critically acclaimed with performances at the Lincoln Centre planned as part of their residency.

Quatuor Diotima celebrates the bicentennial anniversary of Anton Bruckner with a recording of his String Quartet in C Minor, Rondo in C Minor and Theme with Variations in E-Flat Major, alongside the String Quartet in E-Flat Major from his pupil Friedrich Klose. Bruckner wrote these pieces as composition exercises, yet they adumbrate the originality and power of his later works, as well as pay tribute to the glorious Viennese quartet tradition. Like Bruckner, Klose strongly sympathized with Wagner and the proponents of programme music, and chamber music had not appealed to him very much up until the moment he embarked on his only string quartet composition. Sarcastically, he subtitled it a "tribute paid in four instalments to my stern German schoolmasters", yet he demonstrates a full mastery of the conventions of musical form, paired with an almost unprecedented wealth of musical ideas. This album, recorded at and in close cooperation with the Brucknerhaus Linz, shall be one of the most original contributions to the Bruckner year 2024, highlighting his achievements in the field of chamber music as well as his compositional legacy. Quatuor Diotima is one of the most in-demand chamber ensembles in the world today, and has worked in close collaboration with several of the greatest composers of the late twentieth century. Reflected in the mirror of today's music, the quartet projects a new light onto the masterpieces of the 19th and 20th centuries. The quartet returns to PENTATONE after their acclaimed Metamorphosis Ligeti, released in 2023.

The Arcadia Quartet’s acclaimed survey of Weinberg’s String Quartets continues with this fourth volume containing Quartets Nos 6, 13, and 15. Quartet No. 6 was composed in 1946, the composer dedicating it to his friend Georgiy Sviridov, whom he had met in Shostakovich’s circle. The Quartet is a summit of his early achievements, and its musical language is strikingly advanced in relation to traditional Soviet works in the genre. It was banned by the authorities, and as a result, Weinberg wrote no more quartets until after the death of his mentor Shostakovich. String Quartet No. 13 was composed in 1977 and dedicated to the Borodin Quartet. It comprises a single movement lasting some fourteen or fifteen minutes, making it the shortest of all Weinberg’s quartets. String Quartet No. 15, from 1979, is in many respects the most radically conceived of all Weinberg’s quartets – certainly its nine-movement design suggests so. In expressive terms, too, it is one of the most elusive. The movements carry no titles or expressive directions, and, as in the case of his previous two quartets, Weinberg confines himself to metronome indications, avoiding all specification of character.

REVIEWS:

The Arcadia Quartet's underlying technical finesse and emotional commitment duly reinforce this music’s stature.

— Gramophone

Whatever the music’s texture and temperature, the Arcadia group plunge in without fear, doubly armed with their sturdy technique and total commitment to Weinberg’s cause.

— The Times (U.K.)

Bridge Records is pleased to present this previously unissued performance by the Stuyvesant Quartet. The recording is the only known "in concert" recording by this stellar quartet of players associated with Toscanini's legendary NBC Symphony Orchestra, and was made at the Library of Congress's Coolidge Auditorium in 1946. This release is part of Bridge's ongoing series devoted to the Stuyvesant Quartet's historic recordings.

REVIEW:

It is fitting that Prokofiev’s First Quartet is performed here, as this work was first performed at the LoC itself. The inclusion of Dohnányi’s Second Quartet is certainly cause for celebration. Their Dvořák cuts deep emotionally. This disc of historic performances is a little miracle and recommended without hesitation.

— Fanfare

Arnold Schoenberg, one of the most influential musical figures of the 20th century, was born in Vienna in 1874. Sony Classical is celebrating the 150th anniversary of the great composer’s birth with the reissue of 20 CDs of recordings from CBS/American Columbia. The company was a pioneer in documenting Schoenberg’s achievements and already demonstrated that commitment during his lifetime (he died in 1951). In 1940, with the composer conducting, Columbia Masterworks produced the first recording of one of his most captivating and revolutionary works, Pierrot lunaire; and in the 1950s and 60s, the label undertook a ground-breaking multi-volume series entitled “The Music of Arnold Schoenberg”. But arguably no recordings have done more to further the cause of Schoenberg’s orchestral and vocal works than those of Pierre Boulez, while none have done more to promote his chamber music than those by the Juilliard Quartet. Sony Classical now presents all of Boulez’s Schoenberg for CBS/Columbia in a 13-CD box, and all of the Juilliard’s in a 7-disc set.

Michael Haydn did not achieve the same exorbitant quantity of instrumental music as his older brother, since he had to compose a large amount of sacred music because of his position; but the surviving symphonies and chamber music in particular are not lacking in novel and "original" character traits. This becomes clear, for example, in the six string quartets recorded here, which he wrote sometime in the 1770s or 1780s. Here, personable elegance and subtle humour are combined with a quiet touch of tragic drama to create a very unique candour that reveals a world view that is as moving as it is entertaining, somewhere between the masterpieces of his brother Joseph and Amadeus, who was around twenty years younger.

The American critic Robert Reilly described the music on Volume One of this cycle of the complete string quartets of David Matthews (b. 1943) as 'some of the most concentrated, penetrating writing for this medium in the past 30 years or more. It is musical thinking of the highest order and quartet writing in the great tradition of Beethoven, Bartok, Britten, and Tippett'. The three works in this sixth volume of Matthews' complete string quartets cover a quarter of a century but share the same basic features, not least a mastery of counterpoint, an impassioned lyricism, a sublimated hint of folksong and occasionally a sly sense of humour, all deployed to touch something essential in the listener. Matthews begins his booklet note with this release by saluting 'my now nearly 30-year relationship with the Kreutzer Quartet, which has been as invaluable to me as Shostakovich's with the Beethoven Quartet, or Beethoven's with the Schuppanzigh Quartet'.

Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen (1932-2016) managed to unite every faction of progressive Danish music in admiration. After their acclaimed first volume in this new chronological cycle of the composer's complete string quartets, the Nordic String Quartet arrive at the works that reveal the composer's musical imagination in all it's unbridled joy, brilliance and eccentricity. Works spanning 27 years, including three written for the world-famous Kronos Quartet, see the composer toying with form, sparring with nature and grappling with seemingly irreconcilable opposites.

This album features mastered versions of works performed live by the Quatuor Diotima at the Fundacion Juan March on 27 April 2022 and 14 February 2024. It presents the world premiere recordings of String Quartets Nos. 8 and 9 and of the Intermezzo Scherzo on the surname Mi-la-nes by Conrado del Campo (1878-1953), one of the most original but least well-known Spanish composers of the first half of the twentieth century. The concert was part of the Proyecto Conrado, launched in 2021, which involves programming the first complete cycle of his thirteen string quartets. This will go hand in hand with the production of a complete edition of the scores, most of which have never been published, and the release of recordings of the quartets. The aim of this ambitious initiative is to rescue a significant body of works from the undeserved neglect into which they have fallen.

The award-winning Quartetto Adorno present Castelnuovo-Tedesco's complete works for string quartet. He began composing chamber music during the 1920s, and these works date from 1929, 1948 and 1964 respectively. Quartets Nos. 1 and 2 are world premiere recordings. This is a major addition to the comprehensive catalogue of Castelnuovo-Tedesco albums on Naxos.

MusicWeb International made the first volume of this series a Recording of the Month when it was released in 2022. 'This recording by the Quartetto Nous is an exceptionally good one... The superb sound given to the Nous really does make a difference... The Nous play with plenty of grit... but there is always that sense of lamenting, singing voices behind and responding to the violence... If you have any sense that these works are just a bit too austere then this recording is really one to get as it has given me immense pleasure as well as the more expected qualities of a recording of music by Shostakovich.' The Italian ensemble now turns to a trio of quartets traditionally considered inscrutable but (in the right performances) no less filled with both musical and private stories than the quartets of Bartok. The Tenth Quartet embeds the composer's cryptogram, DSCH, within the textures of the outer movements, which are separated by a biting Scherzo and a desolate passacaglia. Reminiscent in these facets of the composer's mid-period symphonies, there is a highly compressed symphonic expression to the quartet. The Eleventh, by contrast is episodic and elliptical, a curtain-raiser to the composer's late style, and the first quartet of four to be dedicated to the individual members of the Beethoven Quartet. Sven brief movements outline and develop a long and winding theme, often making it's way unsteadily along a major-minor ridge. The Twelfth takes a unique form: one of Shostakovich's typical Moderato introductions takes a 12-tone theme as it's subject, though he does not adopt a serial procedure in developing it. This is followed by a long movement condensing elements of Adagio, recitative and fugue which takes the listener on a long dark night of the soul before a major version of it's opening theme wins out, in characteristically equivocal triumph. Between them, the three quartets make a compelling unity of their own, and the Quartetto Nous has established itself among the most distinguished ensembles of our day in this music.

Among his many compositions, Kenneth V. Jones wrote a concerto for string orchestra (1956), a concerto for oboe and strings (1963), The Pollock, an orchestral prelude (1963), O Light Invisible, a cantata for soprano, mixed chorus and orchestra (1963), a sonata for solo violin (1967), Dialysis, for violin and harpsichord (1973), Quaquaverse, for saxophone quartet (1979), Paean for organ (1983), three Sinfonias for orchestra, as well as piano works, song cycles, film, play and television scores and church music, including hymns and anthems. The String Quartet No. 1, Op. 6 (1950) is cast in one unbroken movement consisting of two clear sections. In the short opening Lento espressivo, an eloquent, sinuous theme is introduced by the first violin and then taken up the viola. Gradually the tempo increases, heralding the arrival of the main Allegro moderato, closely argued and driven by an unflagging rhythmic energy. Commenting on this piece, Jones asserted that the 'acerbic, gritty character of the music' is in 'direct contrast' to the pre-Second World War 'English pastoral style'. Nevertheless, there is, to these ears at least, a certain folk-like quality to the writing, not least in it's punchy syncopations, that roots the score in a distinctly British landscape.