Quatuor Voce - Lettres Intimes: Quartets By Bartok Schulhoff - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

The Quatuor Voce presents Poétiques de l'instant, a long-term project and a diptych of recordings that aim to combine two of the key works in the repertory of any string quartet - the masterpieces of Debussy and Ravel - with other pieces of music and new compositions. This first instalment focuses on Debussy's Quartet and the Quatuor Voce has enlisted a young composer, Yves Balmer, for the works that revolve around it he has arranged the Proses lyriques song cycle and has also composed a new piece, Fragments soulevés par le vent. To record this program, the quartet has chosen to perform alongside three exceptional artists, the soprano Jodie Devos, the flautist Juliette Hurel and the harpist Emmanuel Ceysson.

This is the debut from Oxford, England's five piece, dance rock band. Completing the circuit between the minimalism of American composer Steve Reich, guitars that sound like insects and tennis player Andy Roddick, theirs is a uniquely winning formula. Driving percussion high in the mix, guitars played above the 12th fret, no chords and splashes of synth color all come together like the schematics for a piece of precision engineering.

The Quatuor Voce is fifteen years old! To celebrate this anniversary, the four musicians present an album focusing on two composers, Mozart and Schubert, but only one number 15! This milestone, an age imbued with both ardour and maturity, is therefore embodied in the respective fifteenth quartets of these two geniuses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Mozart composed his Quartet No. 15 in 1783, as the second in the set of six quartets dedicated to Haydn. Schubert wrote his Quartet No.15, his last work in the genre, in 1826. He composed it in only ten days but did not live to hear it's first performance, which took place twenty-three years after his death.