Hearne / Cloud / Argus Quartet - Hazy Heart Pump - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

The String Quartet - String Quartet [COMPACT DISCS] date 02/27/2008

The Hard Quartet is a band. But what is a band? A band, perhaps, can be thought of as a body, a corpus, in which physically discrete lifeforms comprise a chimera that shrieks with one voice. In this particular band, which is one of millions in the world today, four players selflessly merge, become musical, and emit rock 'n' roll that is familiar but new, warm but icy, melodic but Sphinx-like in it's seductive and subtle riddles... essentially, The Hard Quartet has leveled, cultivated, and made rich an entirely new steppe in the ecosystem of guitar-bass-drums-voice agriculture.

It not infrequently happens that the compositional oeuvre of a renowned and perhaps even legendary performing artist disappears from view for quite a long time. In the case of Henri Marteau this disappearance was occasioned in part by the circumstance that some of his compositions remained unpublished. Today the violinist Henri Marteau is known mostly only to specialists or fans of Max Reger's music. After all, during the early years of the twentieth century Marteau was an important violin interpreter of Reger's works. The close association between Marteau and Reger, who arranged Marteau's Cello Concerto for piano in 1905, the year of the publication of the String Quartet No. 2, is sometimes quite evident here and in many other works by him. However, the contrapuntal intricacy of Marteau's quartet also holds in store chromatic passages more reminiscent of Nielsen and his Quartet in E flat major op. 14 from 1897-98 than Reger's modulations. In it's own way the quartet very much anticipates developments far into the twentieth century while exploring all the many gives and takes of German and French musical influence. The album also includes Marteau's Huit Mélodies for soprano and string quartet - sung by Karine Deshayes, who in 2016 was named the InchLyric Artist of the YearInch for the second time at the prize ceremony of the Victoires de la Musique.