Italian Postcards: Wolf, Mozart, Borenstein, Tchaikovsky

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Perhaps this reunion is rather heterogenous, but it’s becoming a trend in thematic albums like this. The common theme here is a love of Italy expressed through numerous foreign musicians who came to visit the country and establish themselves there. Presented like a nostalgic postcard from the 1960s, the new album from the Quartetto di Cremona dives in with Hugo Wolf’s luminous Italian Serenade and Mozart’s first Quartet in G major, K. 80 which he composed at the age of fourteen and is Italian only for the location in which it was composed, a hotel in Lodi, Lombardy. Starting curiously with a dreamy adagio (whose principal melodic motif would be repeated by Mozart in his Concerto for flute and harp), he continues with a strikingly assured and asserted writing style. The fourth movement, a French-style rondeau was added several years later upon his return to Salzbourg.

Commissioned expressly for the Quartetto di Cremona for this project, the short piece Cieli d’Italia (2019) by Nimrod Borenstein is superimposed between these diverse styles creating a sort of sonic mini encyclopaedia that details his take on the history of music in seven minutes. It’s a very extensive composition featuring waltzes and tango in a form of hyper expression reminiscent of a beautiful Italian sky.

“It’s horrible when I am happy with myself” wrote Tchaïkovski to his brother Modeste regarding his sextet “Memories of Florence”, one of the rare works that this tortured composer was entirely pleased with. A great surge of pleasure comes out of this splendid work culminating with a sublime and romantic duo, the Adagio cantabile. In order to realise this passionate interpretation, the Italian quartet have called upon Ori Kam, the violist for the Jerusalem Quartet, and Eckart Runge, the founder of the Artemis Quartet. © François Hudry/Qobuz