Schumann - String Quartets 2 & 3 | Alpha ALPHA280

Schumann - String Quartets 2 & 3

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Label: Alpha

Cat No: ALPHA280

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 1

Genre: Chamber

Release Date: 16th February 2018

Contents

About

The Elias Quartet has already recorded a complete cycle of Beethoven quartets at Wigmore Hall that was extremely well received by the critics. Now Sara Bitlloch, Donald Grant, Martin Saving and Marie Bitlloch present on Alpha an album devoted to Schumann: "We have always had a special affection for Robert Schumann’s Third Quartet. It’s one of the first works we played together. Since then we have often come back to it, as if to a splendid and familiar region that we think we know thoroughly, but which yields up new secrets with each visit. The Second Quartet, on the other hand, was a much later and more complicated discovery for us. The writing is so personal, so unidiomatic for the instruments, so full of nuances, that to begin with we found it hard to come up with a unanimous voice for this work. The enthusiasm of the first movement can easily turn into anxiety if you push it a bit too far. In the slow movement, the texture is sometimes so bare that to convey its tenderness you have to sustain it with great fervour. The capricious Scherzo is bristling with rhythmic pitfalls and requires a diabolical mastery of the instruments, while the Finale is an endless explosion of joy!"

Reviews

It’s not that their [the Elias Quartet’s] performances are so much leisurely as they are elastic. The music breathes in their hands; and even when they stretch a phrase as if to feel its emotional weight, it still sounds natural and right. And it’s not that they only pull; they push, too. ... I could go on enumerating the myriad glories of these performances, but you get the idea. ... I can’t recommend it urgently enough.  Andrew Farach-Colton
Gramophone May 2018
Gramophone Editor's Choice

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