Chiaroscuro Quartet HAYDN "Sun" Quartets Op. 20 Nos. 4-6

                                                "SUN" QUARTETS Op. 20 Nos. 4-6

Chiaroscuro Quartet MOZART - MENDELSSOHN

                                                       MOZART - MENDELSSOHN

Chiaroscuro Quartet JOSEPH HAYDN String Quartets Op. 76 | 1-3

                                                    STRING QUARTETS Op. 76 | 1-3

Chiaroscuro Quartet SCHUBERT String Quartets No. 14 in D minor - No. 9 in G minor

One of the truly iconic works in the repertoire for string quartet, Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden is named after the song which has lent its theme to the second movement. At the end of Matthias Claudius’s poem, which Schubert had set as a 20-year-old in 1817, Death cradles the Maiden in his bony embrace. And her fear, in the first verse, of encountering his tomb-cold touch is mirrored by his desire for her in the second. In Schubert’s life time, death was a constant presence in everyday life and even a young person like himself would have encountered it at close quarters – in fact, his own mother had passed away when he was only 15. 

When Schubert returns to the song in 1824 and starts work on the string quartet, death has nevertheless grown even more real: in the meantime he has become acquainted with pain and disease during the bouts of the syphilis that he knows will kill him. He turns the song into a set of variations, preceding it with a ferocious Allegro, and following it with a Scherzo and a Finale that have been described as ‘the dance of the demon fiddler’ and ‘a dance with death’. The acclaimed Chiaroscuro Quartet performs the work on gut strings, which brings out the vulnerability and desperation even further. The players then let us down gently with the youthful String Quartet No. 9 in G minor, a work in which the minor key offers Schubert the opportunity to play with light and shadows, rather than full-scale drama.

Chiaroscuro Quartet BEETHOVEN - MOZART

The multinational Chiaroscuro Quartet promises performances of music of the Classical era "on period instruments informed by a historical approach." This tells you less than it would if applied to Baroque music, but the features of Classical-period historical string performance are in evidence here: vibrato is kept to a minimum, and the scooping accents possible on later instruments are scrupulously weeded out. The biggest surprise, however, would have been possible even played on contemporary instruments: the String Quartet No. 11 in F minor, Op. 95, of Beethoven, designated by Beethoven as "Serioso," is given an interpretation with the seriousness radically scaled down. The group seems to be after a revisionist interpretation that holds that the violent qualities in this quartet were placed there by Romantic after-the-fact thinking and even later by psychoanalysis of Beethoven's difficult life around this time. The music is tense but light, with the really startling harmonic developments in the opening movement treated not as utterances of emotional torture but as little flashes of psychedelic light. The slow movements of all three works on the album are marvelous, with the players perfectly coordinated and the music seeming to breathe like some living creature, the lack of vibrato making the individual instruments difficult to pick out. And the Mozart Adagio and Fugue in C minor for string quartet, K. 546, and String Quartet in E flat major, K. 428 (a work also often given post-facto Romantic intensity) are less startling on first hearing. The Beethoven is one of those performances far enough outside the norm that it's safe to say some will think it's brilliant, some will hate it. But neither group will be able to claim it's not well thought out. (James Manheim)

Chiaroscuro Quartet MOZART - SCHUBERT

Formed in 2005, the Chiaroscuro Quartet consists of the violinists Alina Ibragimova (Russia) and Pablo Hernán Benedí (Spain), the Swedish violist Emilie Hörnlund and cellist Claire Thirion from France. Dubbed ‘a trailblazer for the authentic performance of High Classical chamber music’ in Gramophone, this highly international ensemble performs music of the Classical period on gut strings. The quartet’s unique sound – described in The Observer as ‘a shock to the ears of the best kind’ – is highly acclaimed by audiences and critics all over Europe, and is the fruit of its lithe and gracious playing combined with an extraordinarily committed ensemble mentality.  An acclaimed and growing discography includes recordings of music by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn.

The Chiaroscuro Quartet was a prize-winner of the German Förderpreis Deutschlandfunk/Musikfest Bremen in 2013 and received Germany’s most prestigious CD award, the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik in 2015 for its latest recording of Mozart’s quartet in d-minor K421 and Mendelssohn’s 2nd string quartet in a-minor opus 13.

Among the ensemble’s chamber music partners are renowned artists such as Kristian Bezuidenhout, Nicolas Baldeyrou, Chen Halevi, Trevor Pinnock, Malcolm Bilson and Christophe Coin.

Recent engagements included their enthusiastically received debut concert at Vienna Konzerthaus and Philharmonie Warsaw. Other highlights in the past took the ensemble to the Edinburgh International Festival, Concertgebouw Amsterdam, London’s Wigmore Hall, Auditorio Nacional de Música Madrid, Music Festival Grafenegg, The Sage Gateshead (recorded for BBC Radio 3), Auditorium du Louvre Paris, Théâtre du Jeu-de-Paume in Aix-en-Provence, Grand Théâtre de Dijon, Gulbenkian Foundation Lisbon, West Cork Festival and for a residency to Aldeburgh.

In the season 2015/2016, the Chiaroscuro Quartet will appear on stage at Gulbenkian Foundation Lisbon, Amsterdam Concertgebouw or Sendesaal Bremen amongst others. The ensemble will also continue to perform Mozart's masterworks for piano and string quartet together with Kristian Bezuidenhout in leading concert halls such as Laeiszhalle Hamburg, Palau de la Música Barcelona, BR Munich, Meisterkonzerte Dresden, Kartause Ittingen and Bern. In April 2016 the quartet will embark on its first concert tour to Japan playing concerts in Tokyo and Hyogo.

Since 2009, the Chiaroscuro Quartet has been artist-in-residence in Port-Royal-des-Champs giving a concert series dedicated to Mozart’s string quartets.