Ruysdael Quartet - Russian Generations 3 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

String Quartet No. 3 in E? minor Op. 30 (1876) Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky I Andante sostenuto - Allegro moderato II Allegretto vivo e scherzando III Andante funebre e doloroso, ma con moto IV Finale. Allegro non troppo e risoluto In 1876 at the age of thirty-five Tchaikovsky enjoyed a brief but inspiring trip from his native city of Moscow to visit Modest, his brother, in Paris. On the 20th January the composer saw one of the final performances of the first production of Bizet's Carmen. It had a profound effect on him and he was to later describe it as Inchperhaps the most outstanding operatic work of our age.Inch During his time in Paris, Tchaikovsky was beginning work on his third and final string quartet. Perhaps due to his rapture at seeing Carmen, the quartet appears to have sprung from one of Tchaikovsky's less depressive periods. However the impetus for writing the work was the death of his friend the Czech violinist and composer Ferdinand Laub who was also a colleague at the Moscow Conservatory. Laub had been the first violinist in the premiere performances of the composer's first (1871) and second (1874) string quartets, so it seems only fitting that Tchaikovsky dedicated the work to his memory. Tchaikovsky completed the work in less than two months whereupon it received a number of performances, the first being a private performance on 14th March 1876 at one of Nikolai Rubinstein's soirées. The next day, during a bout of self-doubt, Tchaikovsky wrote to Modest InchI think I'm all written outInch and accused himself of rewriting the same ideas. The work is both brooding and elegiac and hailed by academics as an equal, if not a superior, of the two earlier quartets. Tchaikovsky had already demonstrated his assured mastery of the medium in the previous two works and in the third quartet only need expand on the expressive and communicative qualities that were alre