Armida Quartett

Armida Quartett – Armida Quartett : Mozart: String Quartets K. 169, K. 464 & K. 589 (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:28 minutes | 1,19 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © CAvi-music

Every string quartet dreams of having its own Mozart cycle: for its 10th anniversary in 2016, the Armida Quartet plans to perform all 23 works in public. The composer was part of each one of their lives long before the ensemble was formed. Playing in orchestras, in chamber music and in solo recitals, the Armida Quartet’s future members already got to know and love Mozart.

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Armida Quartett – Beethoven – Shostakovich (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:00:33 minutes | 581 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © CAvi-music

The Armida Quarter, darling of BBC young artists and due to perform at the Wigmore Hall, they will also play at the BBC PROMS on 29 August 2016 at the Cadogan Hall. The new album contains Beethoven Op. 59 No 1 and Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 10, two very difficult pieces. “Opus 59 is extremely challenging”, remarks Martin Funda, the leader of the Armida Quartet. “One needs time to grasp these pieces. As performers, we are surprised again and again to note how quickly Beethoven star ts leading us into unfamiliar waters. The F Major Quartet is an ‘extrovert’ piece; at the same time, it contains a series of incredibly profound moments and a variety of different moods which we have to learn to interpret.” … Also available: Bartók, String Quartet No.4, Ligeti, String Quartet No.1, Kurtág, String Quartet Nr. 1 (AVI8553298) Mozart, String Quartets in A major K.169; in A major K. 464; in B-flat major K. 589 (AVI8553318)
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Armida Quartett – Mozart: String Quartets, Vol. V (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:06:18 minutes | 2,15 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © CAvi-music

Boredom (in German: “long whiling”) is apparently what drove Wolfgang to compose one of his string quartets at the inn at Bolzano. And yes, he was doing well, as father Leopold assured Mozart’s mother in a letter dated 28 October 1772. How can we even imagine what boredom must have felt like for a 16-year-old genius? Was he sitting lackadaisically at the table with his father, scribbling counterpoint on paper and casually inventing the genre of Classical string quartet in passing? Or was Wolfgang just solving musical-logical Sudokus, as we all tend to do in such cases?
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Armida Quartett – Mozart: String Quartets, Vol. IV (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:02:31 minutes | 1,09 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © CAvi-music

Dissonance Quartet – the name already contains the thrill of transgression. But a dissonance, in which the parts momentarily diverge from triadic harmony, is the necessary condition to achieve an aesthetic of four-part conflict, such as was sought after in the genre of classical string quartet. Mozart’s work in C Major with the “dissonance” epithet is the highlight of a group of six quartets in which he responded to the music of his colleague Joseph Haydn and the latter’s concept of discursive thematic work in a four-part texture. Apart from motivic development, this art of the string quartet enacts a situation of harmonic debate by featuring a series of successive and simultaneous dissonances. Still, the choice of “dissonance” as a main characteristic for an epithet tends to emphasize the aspect of unease over the rational element of discourse. And that is indeed the way Mozart’s contemporaries heard this music. Several of them were irritated by the meandering harmonies in Mozart’s “Haydn quartets”, particularly in the Dissonance Quartet – and certain colleagues even insisted that apparently “false” notes would need to be corrected. Today’s audiences, with their well-advanced musical experience in many styles, no longer find the majority of these dissonances disturbing; our ears can easily twist them into ostensibly classical complacency. Nevertheless, the dissonance at the onset which gave the quartet its name can still sound false in certain people’s ears. While the parts seem to “grope in the dark”, entering one after the other, the first violin comes in last on a note of seemingly entirely different provenance than the others. The rules of euphony may be broken here, but this is everything else than a careless mistake, and Mozart makes this clear by repeating the entire progression on another degree of the scale. Experts have proposed hair-splitting theoretical explanations to reconcile this dissonance with the rules of harmony, but the notes we hear simultaneously are not even particularly dissonant. The divergent note serves as a signal. It introduces a harmonic scission that leads our ears down a path which will allow the lower parts to free themselves from the gravity of downward resolution, inviting them to float upward instead. Mozart was thus the first composer to have begun a string quartet with a slow, groping introduction that provokes our ears with a dissonance, inviting us to embark on a different trajectory.

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Armida Quartett – Mozart: String Quartets, Vol. III (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:55:41 minutes | 2,09 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © CAvi-music

Following the critically acclaimed volumes I and II of their Mozart String Quartet series, the Armida Quartett is delighted to bring volume III in a double album. With the recordings here, the Armida Quartet has reached the halfway mark in a project that seeks to intimately explore an entire mountain range.

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Armida Quartett – Mozart: String Quartets, Vol. 2 (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:09 minutes | 1,30 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © CAvi-music

The Armida Quartet is holding an unusual kind of rehearsal, skimming through three Mozart string quartets with musicologist and Henle’s publishing director Wolf-Dieter Seiffert. The focus this time is not on sound quality, musical character, or developing an extended formal overview – all qualities for which the Armida Quartet is well-known – but on achieving a good match between philological accuracy and practical music-making. Seiffert is working on a new edition of the Mozart string quartets for his publishing house in Munich, and has sought out direct contact with the members of the Berlin string quartet to clarify doubts regarding dynamics, ties and tempi (see the interview with Mr. Seiffert in the booklet). When a case is truly difficult, the most technically feasible or desirable alternative helps him decide which variant will ultimately figure in the new Urtext edition.

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Armida Quartett – Fuga Magna (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 58:33 minutes | 1,04 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © CAvi-music

Armida Quartet’s “seven-league-boot” journey across the realm of fugue begins with the two earliest published German works in the genre for instrumental ensemble from the year 1602 by baroque German composer Valentin Hausmann (1560-1614). Haussmann’s Fugae are written “for all kinds of instruments”: idiomatic passagework for violin is thus entirely absent here, and only emerged as a stylistic trait in the course of the 17th century. Alessandro Scarlatti is the composer of four sonatas that are to be performed senza cembalo, as he specifies, and which are often referred to as the first string quartets. The animated movements are complex counterpoint constructions; the middle movements are tortuous harmonic meanders of great interest. Johann Sebastian Bach’s last cycle of compositions, which remained unfinished, is the Art of Fugue, a masterpiece that crowned a 500-year tradition as well as his own life achievement. The cycle was unquestionably intended for keyboard instruments; nevertheless, already in the 18th century it was likewise played on string instruments. Such performances do not deprive the work of any of its substance, since, in Art of Fugue (as opposed to the fugues in his concertos and sonatas), Bach eschewed any type of idiomatic writing associated with a particular instrument. The quartet sonata by Bach’s pupil Johann Gottlieb Goldberg is one of the finest examples of the undiminished vitality proven by Late Baroque fugue artistry immediately prior to its “demystification”: a firework display of the mind and of the fingers. For unknown reasons, Mozart composed a very complex Fugue in C Minor for two pianos in 1783; then1788, when he was preparing a string quartet arrangement thereof to be published by Hoffmeister, he added an Adagio introduction. Finally, as regards Beethovens Grosse Fuge written in 1826 and initially meant to become the last movement of his Thirteenth string quartet — it was eventually discarded because of the intense difficulty for both listeners and interpreters and became a piece of its own –, are viewer wrote (when the finale was still said fugue): “The critic does not dare to interpret the meaning behind the fugue finale: to him it was incomprehensible, like Chinese… Perhaps, if the master could actually hear his own creations, some passages might have been written differently. We should not condemn this work too prematurely, however: a time may come when that which at first seemed murky and convoluted will be hailed as clear and pleasant in all of its forms.” And he was right, even though the piece remains, even nowadays, a rather complex attention test for any listener. Winning the ARD International Competition in 2012 (also taking the audience prize and six other special prizes) propelled the Armida Quartet on to the international concert platform. Between 2014-16 the Quartet participated on the UK’s BBC New Generation Artists scheme affording them many concerts broadcast across the BBC network including their BBC Proms debut. Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie nominated the Quartet on to the European Concert Hall Organisation Rising Stars-Series during the 2016/2017 season.

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