Fitzwilliam String Quartet - Chamber Music - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Experience a staple of the Oxford calendar in this set of works inspired by the May Morning tradition, with music spanning from the traditional to contemporary. Starting with The College Clock welcoming in the sunrise, this special recording displays The Magdalen College Choir in radiant form, shining in the glorious acoustics of the Church of St. John the Evangelist, Oxford. The Choir of Magdalen College, Oxford was founded in 1480 with provision made in the statutes for 16 singing boys, eight Academical Clerks and four chaplains. Magdalen College was then one of the oldest and largest choral foundations in late-medieval England, and this historic legacy has been preserved and maintained over five centuries. The Choir, which now enjoys an international reputation as one of the finest ensembles in the UK, exists primarily to sing the daily church services in Magdalen College Chapel.

Of these two great classical quartets which look forward so much to the heights of the Romantic period, one (InchDeath and the MaidenInch) is almost universally loved. The almost contemporary A minor quartet is sometimes referred to as the 'Rosamunde' because of it's strong thematic links to Schubert's incidental music to that play. Both are here played on period instruments, with gut strings, in what is an authentic and thoroughly top-class performance by one of our foremost string ensembles. The Fitzwilliam Quartet has just celebrated it's 50thanniversary. Acknowledged as one of the finest British quartets of our age they are equally at home in the classics, playing period instruments, or in the modern and contemporary repertoire, having had personal links with Shostakovich who called the Fitzwilliams Inchthe preferred performers of my quartetsInch.

Having celebrated it's fiftieth anniversary in 2019, it is perhaps remarkable that the Fitzwilliam String Quartet has not already recorded this towering pinnacle of Western music repertoire Schubert's String Quartet in G major, D. 887. This revelatory recording on period instruments proves it was well worth the wait! The work's idiomatic grandeur and overall complexity coupled with it's everchanging tonalities and otherworldly atmosphere call for the sort of stamina that is the privilege of a limited few. The Fitzwilliams rise admirably to the challenge, demonstrating the characteristic expertise which has defined their recordings over many decades. Inexplicably left unfinished, the C minor 'Quartettsatz' rounds off the program. This chiseled, and yet formally unorthodox, single movement is presented here with it's Andante second movement completed by leading Schubert scholar Brian Newbould.