The Starry Sky (Beethoven - Hersant)

Album review

This new album seems to confirm that the Girard Quartet, born of a litter of great French musicians, is now all grown up. Founded by members of the Ysaÿe Quartet, the Girard Quartet won the Geneva Competition in 2011, after taking the Prize of the Maurice Ravel Academy in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Currently residing at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel in Belgium, they also work with the Singer-Polignac Foundation. The title of their fourth recording, "The Starry Sky" is borrowed from Philippe Hersant's Fourth Quartet, Der gestirner Himmel, written in 2012 "in response" to Beethoven's Quartet op. 59 n° 2 specifically the slow movement conceived as "a meditation on the harmony of the spheres, before the starry sky in the silence of the night." Like Beethoven, who of course features on this record, Hersant is expressing here, through a long, single movement, his "aspiration for a union of heaven and earth", through a resolutely accessible language which holds out its hand towards the Beethovian model, borrowing from it a few rhythmic and thematic cells, and to the late Romanticism of the Schönberg of the Verklärte Nacht, another great nocturnal meditation. Note also the magnificent cohesion of the Girard Quartet, as well as its accumulated power of expression and its superb ensemble sound, bolstered by the use of four instruments made between 2014 and 2016 by the Parisian manufacturer Charles Coquet, whose work is inspired by the great artisanal producers of stringed instruments from centuries gone by. © François Hudry/Qobuz

Details of the original recording : Recorded September 2017 at the Haas-Teichen studio of the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel (Belgium)