Quatuor Ludwig - String Quintets 1 & 2 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Richard Jones - Chamber Airs for a Violin (& Thorough Bass) [COMPACT DISCS] date 06/19/2012

While the music world is getting ready for next year's 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven's birth, this year's bicentennial of the birth of the Polish national composer Stanislaw Moniuszko has gone practically unnoticed outside Poland. For this reason, this new recording of his two string quartets is all the more welcome. The composer who would become the celebrated master of the operas Halka and The Haunted Manor wrote these quartets during or shortly after his Berlin study years and in a style continuing to draw on the vocabulary of classical models. At the same time, the twenty-year-old student displays a sense of humor, melodicism, and chamber finesse that not only make for a genuinely rewarding listening experience but also are worth hearing again and again. A InchlateInch creation by Moniuszko's young fellow Pole Juliusz Zarebski is being presented here together with the quartets. At the end of his life this favorite pupil and confidant of Franz Liszt wrote an absolutely Inchavant-gardeInch piano quintet that might have launched a bold and daring oeuvre but ended up serving as a farewell when this virtuoso pianist and composer delighting in experiment died in 1885, he was a mere thirty-one years old.

The artists write InchIn February 2009, on a date very close to the celebration of Mendelssohn's 200th birthday, we got together for the first time in a quintet lineup in order to perform a small concert in the form of a public rehearsal. The repertoire was rapidly chosen it had to include at least one piece by Mendelssohn. After that successful experiment, we spontaneously decided upon the composer's second surname for our new quintet...Inch Next to Mozart the two String Quintets by Felix Mendelssohn are probably the most known and famous string quartets in the classical genre. This album is the second from the ensemble on Avi after having released their highly acclaimed first album with works by Bruckner and Zemlinsky in 2016, just 5 years prior.