Asasello Quartett - String Quartets - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Dmitri Shostakovich's death, the Asasello Quartet completes it's full recording of the most significant string quartet cycle of the twentieth century for GENUIN. The great Russian composer left behind fifteen quartets - works by a complex, despairing, tender, distant, and enigmatic figure whose music continues to move and compel with it's timeless power, even half a century after his passing. This is especially the case in these masterful interpretations by the Asasello Quartet, which are technically flawless and infused with the shared experience of 25 years, as well as with an extraordinarily profound engagement with the composer's life and oeuvre.

This is Asasello Quartet's second Genuin CD featuring works by Michael Jarrell, Conclon Nancarrow and Rolf Riehm.

The intimacy, the proximity of the song stems from this special dialogue between voice and piano in which poetry can be found as much in the text as in it's musical transcription, with a refinement of elocution and musical form. The French art of the song ('la mélodie') was born in the early years of the nineteenth century, and the greatest composers excelled in it, from Gabriel Fauré to Claude Debussy, not forgetting Reynaldo Hahn and others less celebrated but no less fascinating, such as Déodat de Séverac. The programme of this revisits songs originally conceived for voice and piano, here transcribed for guitar. The delicacy of the plucked strings reinforces this proximity between the two languages, poetic and musical, as if the spider-like touch of the guitar was better suited than the paradoxically heavier finesse of the piano. This project, however, is above all the outcome of long years of work from the Duo Varnerin, a knowledgeable blend of a beautiful family story and a delicate musical encounter. After having followed an individual path with their own experiences before, sister and brother joined forces to unite their knowledge, their techniques and their musical affinities in the service of an uncommonly rare programme, with all the tenderness and refinement that these gems of French song deserve.