Schumann Quartett - String Quartets - SUPER-AUDIO CD [Super Audio CD (SACD)]

It is a young, fresh, unspoiled view on the music of centuries past that has secured the Schumann Quartet, since it's foundation in 2007, the uninterrupted attention of music public. Together with Estonian violist Lisa Randalu, the ensemble's latest Ars Production brings their unmistakable enthusiasm and breathtaking technical sovereignty to three very different works by Mozart, Verdi and Ives that have been in the quartet's repertoire for some time, maturing over many concert performances. InchNo doubt The future belongs to this quartet.Inch (Ensemble Magazine)

The Elias Quartet has already recorded a complete cycle of Beethoven quartets at Wigmore Hall that was extremely well received by the critics. Now Sara Bitlloch, Donald Grant, Martin Saving and Marie Bitlloch present on Alpha an album devoted to Schumann 'We have always had a special affection for Robert Schumann's Third Quartet. It's one of the first works we played together. Since then we have often come back to it, as if to a splendid and familiar region that we think we know thoroughly, but which yields up new secrets with each visit. The Second Quartet, on the other hand, was a much later and more complicated discovery for us. The writing is so personal, so unidiomatic for the instruments, so full of nuances, that to begin with we found it hard to come up with a unanimous voice for this work. The enthusiasm of the first movement can easily turn into anxiety if you push it a bit too far. In the slow movement, the texture is sometimes so bare that to convey it's tenderness you have to sustain it with great fervour. The capricious Scherzo is bristling with rhythmic pitfalls and requires a diabolical mastery of the instruments, while the Finale is an endless explosion of joy!'

The Schumann Quartet and pianist Hinrich Alpers dedicate their upcoming album to three composers and the repertoire of the first half of the 20th century?. The album brings together three composers who could not be more different and who have different life stories - and yet have musical similarities?. It includes the following works Frank Martin - Piano Quintet; Viktor Ullmann - String Quartet No. 3 (composed in Theresienstadt); Gabriel Faure - Piano Quintet No. 1.