Nordic String Quartet - String Quartets Vol. 1 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen (1932-2016) wrote string quartets all his life. Fourteen in all; the first three dating from 1959, the last ones from 2013. Launching it's complete cycle of Gudmundsen-Holmgreen's string quartets, the Nordic String Quartet here presents the first six quartets Honesty meets schoolboy pranks, obstinacy meets doubt, yes meets no - Gudmundsen-Holmgreen's string quartets are full of such clashes. We start at one point and end at a totally different one. Never fusty, often entertaining, always adamant. The Nordic String Quartet is a young, highly skilled quartet, formed by professor Tim Frederiksen, and thus following the successes of the Danish String Quartet and Nightingale String Quartet. Album Tracks 1. String Quartet No. 5, InchStep By StepInch 2. String Quartet No. 1 3. String Quartet No. 6, InchPartingInch 4. String Quartet No. 3, InchFive Small StudiesInch 5. String Quartet No. 4 6. String Quartet No. 2, InchQuartetto FacileInch

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. Album Tracks 1. String Quartet No. 7, InchPartedInch 2. String Quartet No. 8, InchGroundInch 3. String Quartet No. 9, InchLast GroundInch 4. String Quartet No. 10, InchNew GroundInch

Unchanged since it's formation more than a decade ago, the Quartetto Noûs has made albums for the Amadeus tag and the Italian division of Warner Classics, but this is the ensemble's first recording to receive international distribution and attention. Having studied with the Quartetto di Cremona but also quartet luminaries such as Gunter Pichler and Rainer Schmidt, they combine an Italian warmth of collective sonority with the incisive musical instincts of modern-European schools of quartet playing. Pesenting five of Shostakovich's best-known quartets, this volume presents the first in a projected series of the complete quartets for on Brilliant Classics. Contemporaneous with the postwar Ninth Symphony which attracted censure for it's unsettling humor, the Third Quartet of 1946 remained one of the composer's own favorite works, and it's five-movement form dives deep into dark waters before finding uneasy rest in one of Shostakovich's most characteristically edgy finales. It was following the death of Stalin in 1953 that several of Shostakovich's works began to feature his musical monogram, DSCH transliterated into notation, and the Fifth Quartet is one of the first such pieces. The contrapuntal working of the quartet makes it one of the most satisfying in the cycle, while the Seventh presents the composer once more as oddball clown, the Fool to the King Lear of the Eighth Quartet, where the DSCH motif finds a tragic apotheosis. The five-movement form once more serves Shostakovich well in the Ninth but signs of his refined and austere 'late style' begin to appear in the solemn simplicity of the slow music and the pithy exhilaration of the finale, which is almost a quartet in itself and the most Bartókian movement of the entire cycle. Album Tracks 1. String Quartet No.3 in F Op.73 2. String Quartet No.5 in B-Flat Op.92 3. String Quartet No.7 in F-Sharp minor