Emmanuel Pahud BEETHOVEN

 

BEETHOVEN

 

Amihai Grosz / Sunwook Kim SCHUBERT - SHOSTAKOVICH - PÁRTOS

 

SCHUBERT - SHOSTAKOVICH - PÁRTOS

 

Gili Schwarzman / Guy Braunstein / Susanna Yoko Henkel / Amihai Grosz / Alisa Weilerstein OLD SOULS

                                                                     OLD SOULS

Jerusalem Quartet BELÁ BARTÓK String Quartets Nos. 2, 4 & 6

The Jerusalem players open Bartók’s Second Quartet with a passionate account of the first movement, knitting its disparate elements into a satisfying whole, imbued with warmth and featuring some beautiful high keening from cellist Kyril Zlotnikov. The snarling, raucous second movement is shocking in its pagan intensity, and the mystery of the slowly unfolding finale is heightened by exemplary attention to Bartók’s markings. The first movement of the Fourth Quartet snaps away splendidly, with some wonderful muscular glissandos. The cellist shows his mettle again with a robust recitative at the opening of the third movement, with beautifully spectral playing from the other players to follow. The pizzicato fourth movement is full-bodied, perhaps a little too much so when Bartók asks for quiet. In the finale the players are too wise and musical to treat every fortissimo as an attack (as some do), and there is beauty and sophistication to match the energy.

In the Sixth Quartet the playing is clear and limpid in the first movement; the Marcia and Burletta are by turns rhythmically crisp and low-down louche. The plaintive last movement is simply done and affecting. These are fine performances, shot through with beauty. The recording is close-miked and resonant. (Tim Homfray)

A whole life in three quartets
The string quartets of Béla Bartók punctuate the evolution of his style and the turning points of his existence. From the Second Quartet (1915-17) reflecting the period of World War One and his troubled personal life, through the Fourth whose exploration of rhythm, tonality and timbre produces magnificent and unprecedented sonorities in its ‘night music’, to the unbearable anguish of the Sixth (1939), as his dream of fraternity was shattered against the rise of nationalism and fascism, the Jerusalem Quartet’s programme brings us the essence of the Bartókian genius.

DOBRINKA TABAKOVA String Paths

ECM New Series presents the first full album devoted to the music of Dobrinka Tabakova, a composer born in Bulgaria in 1980 but raised from a young age in London and educated there. In Tabakova’s music – richly melodic, texturally sensuous, often emotionally radiant – there resides the new and the familiar, or rather the familiar within the new, and vice versa; there are the spirits of East and West coursing through the pieces, usually hand in hand; and just as the composer’s technical virtuosity is apparent, she possesses a desire, and a talent, for direct communication that can be heard in virtually every measure. The recording features Tabakova’s Concerto for Cello and Strings, plus the Rameau-channelling Suite in Old Style for viola and chamber orchestra. Then there are three chamber works: the string trio Insight, the string septet Such Different Paths and a trio for violin, accordion and double-bass, Frozen River Flows. The performers include violinist Janine Jansen and several of Tabakova’s former conservatory colleagues: violinist Roman Mints, violist-conductor Maxim Rysanov and cellist Kristina Blaumane, principal with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
Tabakova’s music has a particularly 21st-century feel for its broad palette – its free mix of tonality and modality, of folk-music influence and the example of past masters. Her ECM debut came about after a happenstance meeting of the composer with label founder-producer Manfred Eicher at the Lockenhaus Festival in Austria, where Rysanov was performing Tabakova’s Suite in Old Style (part of a triptych of suites she has written for him, along with a concerto). The resulting album presents Tabakova works from 2002 through 2008. (ECM Records)