Escher String Quartet

Escher String Quartet – Terra Incognita (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 29:17 minutes | 490 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Orchid Classics

Pierre Jalbert’s music immediately captures one’s attention with its strong gesture and vitality. Rich in instrumental color and harmonically engaging, its narrative is dramatically compelling yet always logical in its flow. In the orchestral Chamber Symphony, big sky, and Fire and Ice, and in numerous chamber compositions, he synthesizes an array of current musical resources into bold, deeply satisfying, personal statements that surprise and delight.

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Escher String Quartet – Mendelssohn: String Quartets Nos. 1 & 4 (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:20:10 minutes | 1,48 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS Records AB

Founded in 2005, the Escher String Quartet is still a young ensemble as string quartets go. It has nevertheless become established as one of the most exciting quartets around, both in its home country, the U.S.A., and elsewhere, recently being shortlisted for a BBC Music Magazine Award. With their début disc on BIS, the Eschers launch a three-disc cycle of Mendelssohn’s string quartets, including the unnumbered String Quartet in E flat major and – on coming instalments – the four pieces for string quartet Op. 81. The quartet genre accompanied Mendelssohn throughout his life, from the previously mentioned E flat major quartet – which he composed at the age of 14 – to String Quartet No. 6 in F minor, his last major work, completed only two months before his death in 1847. As a body, the quartets demonstrate many of Mendelssohn’s finest qualities as a composer – his fascination for and understanding of the music of both Bach and Beethoven, his affinity for string instruments, and that gift for melody as well as texture which has made his Lieder ohne Worte and the elfin music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream so eternally popular. Composed in 1829, the Quartet Op. 12 is still an early work – from the time of the Hebrides Overture – while the E minor quartet, Op. 44 No. 2, can be counted as one of the first master-pieces by the mature composer.

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Escher String Quartet – Janáček & Haas: String Quartets (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:15:50 minutes | 1,43 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

While the concept of the programmatic and autobiographical quartet seems to have been introduced by Beethoven, nowhere has it been taken up more forcefully than in the Czech lands, as the works presented here attest.

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Escher String Quartet – Mendelssohn: String Quartets Nos. 1 & 4 (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:20:10 minutes | 1,48 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

Founded in 2005, the Escher String Quartet is still a young ensemble as string quartets go. It has nevertheless become established as one of the most exciting quartets around, both in its home country, the U.S.A., and elsewhere, recently being shortlisted for a BBC Music Magazine Award. With their début disc on BIS, the Eschers launch a three-disc cycle of Mendelssohn’s string quartets…

(more…)

Escher String Quartet – Barber & Ives: String Quartets (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:13:58 minutes | 1,32 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

Previous releases from the New York-based Escher Quartet include an acclaimed set of Mendelsohn’s six String Quartets as well as an album with works by Dvor’ak, Tchaikovsky and Borodin. For their latest offering the members have looked closer to home, however, choosing to combine the quartets by Samuel Barber and Charles Ives. The recording opens with Barber’s String Quartet in B minor, containing the music for which the composer remains best-known: the second movement which he two years later expanded into Adagio for Strings. Recognizing its potential already while composing it, Barber described the piece as “a knock-out” – which made it all the more difficult to come up with a third movement worthy to follow it. In the end he decided to make the quartet a two-movement work, but the Eschers have here included the lively third movement that the composer discarded, offering the opportunity to hear the work as it was once planned.

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