Schumann : The String Quartets

Album review

Since it was formed in 2007, the Stradivari Quartet has built up an enviable international reputation for itself both through its concerts and recordings. Throughout all of this it has remained in close contact with its audiences, who often follow the players as a loyal and enthusiastic fan base. The Stradivari Quartet is undoubtedly one of the most interesting ensembles currently before the public. All four members are additionally engaged in other artistic activities. The Quartet gives around forty concerts a year in Switzerland and throughout the world and has appeared at London’s Wigmore Hall, the Berlin Philharmonie, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art etc. The Stradivari Quartet performs a wide range of music, while concentrating increasingly on major cycles of works by a single composer and generally spread out over an entire season. March 2017 was Schumann’s turn… The composer’s earliest plans to tackle the ne plus ultra of chamber music date back to 1838, when he wrote to Clara: “I’m looking forward to the quartets as the piano is becoming too limiting for me; it’s especially strange that I write almost everything in canon form and that it isn’t until afterwards that I discover the voices that echo the melodic line, often in inversions, retrograde rhythms etc.” Although Schumann completed the String Quartets Op. 41 in a matter of barely two months in 1842, they had been preceded by a lengthy gestational process. He gained access to the medium by studying the classics: Beethoven and Mendelssohn, Haydn, Mozart and Schubert. It is remarkable, though, that he never tackled the string quartet again after 1842. © SM/Qobuz