Juliette Hurel / Quatuor Voce MOZART Complete Flute Quartets

                                                    COMPLETE FLUTE QUARTETS

Quatuor Voce BEETHOVEN

Since its inception in 2004, the Quatuor Voce has been recognised internationally as one of the most fascinating string quartets among the young generation, performing worldwide alone or alongside outstanding artists such as Yuri Bashmet, Gary Hoffman, Nobuko Imai, Bertrand Chamayou, David Kadouch, Juliane Banse, to name but a few.

In only a few years the quartet received the highest prizes from renowned international competitions, including Geneva, Cremona, Vienna, Bordeaux, Graz, London and Reggio Emilia, and since then has been committed to championing the great repertoire for string quartet, seeking guidance from some of its leading exponents (the Ysaÿe Quartet, Günter Pichler, Eberhard Felz).

Their recordings of Schubert and Beethoven string quartets and the complete Mozart’s Flute Quartets (with French flautist Juliette Hurel) were met with high critical acclaim by the international press (The Strad, Télérama, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Diapason, Strings and Bow and Klassieke Zaken) as was their CD of Brahms and Mozart’s string quintets with violist Lise Berthaud in 2015.

...they know the architecture of the music from the inside out. (David Threasher / Gramophone)

Quatuor Voce ITINÉRAIRE

“After many years of performing, and with a whole range of experiences nurtured by many different new encounters, we have conceived Itinéraire as a journey with sixteen strings, freely inspired by the trailblazing example of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. At the dawn of the 20th century these two young musicians, their remarkable futures still lying ahead, toured the villages of central Europe, gathering, transcribing and recording hundreds of melodies and folk songs. 

This ethnomusicological work gave birth to uniquely coloured new masterpieces, and we want to add our own contribution to the treasury of the string quartet repertoire by exploring afresh the possibilities of interaction between music of the oral tradition and the art of the string quartet. 

And so we have chosen five superb artists from a range of diverse backgrounds – Kinan Azmeh, Vincent Peirani, Kevin Seddiki, Vincent Segal and Gabriel Sivak – giving each one a commission inspired by musical worlds with which they have a close relationship. 

In view of the novelty of the ideas involved, we have enlisted the acute hearing and expertise of Vincent Segal, a unique practitioner of the cello, who has accompanied us in our instrumental and musical research. 

In the course of this Itinéraire, there will be a halt at ‘Escalay’ (‘The Water Wheel’) – by Hamza El Din – with a brief nod in the direction of our illustrious elder brethren, the Kronos Quartet.”

Quatuor Voce / Lise Berthaud MOZART - BRAHMS String Quintets

Since the very beginning of our quartet, ten years ago, we have always cultivated collaborations with artists from different horizons and diverse backgrounds. The string quintet seems to us to be the most natural and the most intimate of formations, seamlessly merging with the established ensemble an instrument which already has a brother in the quartet and redistributing the material without signi cantly changing the framework. The viola quintet repertoire has followed us from our rst steps as a string quartet right up to the present day, be it with distinguished teachers (Miguel da Silva, Yuri Bashmet) or with brilliant artists of our generation such as Lise Berthaud, who inspires us with her generous sound and innate musical instinct. 

Whether in Mozart or Brahms, we have constantly admired and enjoyed the ease, the liberty of expression and the sheer joy this fth voice confers on their music. As if the addition of a second viola resolved all the problems which arise with four instruments, Brahms and Mozart offer us masterworks of orchestral dimensions, the meeting of the most intimate and the most universal of worlds. Those four extra strings seem to expand even further the quartet’s already vast spectrum of sound.