Quatuor Arod – Debussy, Attahir, Ravel (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Quatuor Arod – Debussy, Attahir, Ravel (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:18:18 minutes | 1,32 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warner Classics

Composed a decade apart, Debussy and Ravel’s string quartets make a very natural pair. Quatuor Arod celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2023 and, to mark the occasion, puts these two masterpieces of the Belle Époque in a contemporary context with a third work, Al Asr by the young French composer Benjamin Attahir. In 2017, Quatuor Arod gave the world premiere of Benjamin Attahir’s Al Asr, a momentous work that draws its inspiration from Muslim afternoon prayers as well as the moment of intense heat midway between noon and sunset. “Al Asr is dedicated to my wonderful friends of Quatuor Arod,” Attahir emphasized. “They have brought it to life in a way I would never have dared to dream”.

Erato is releasing a DVD of the documentary film about the Arod Quartet along with the CD. It is entitled Ménage à quatre and was directed by Bruno Monsaingeon. His first experience with the Quatuor Arod was a true discovery: “Have I ever heard before such pure attack, such dramatic power, such variety of timbre and dynamics – all combined with an amazing sensitivity to phrasing?”.

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Quatuor Arod – The Mathilde Album (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/192kHz]

Quatuor Arod – The Mathilde Album (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:20:26 minutes | 2,58 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warner Classics

With this album of works by Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Webern – key figures in Vienna’s musical life in the early 20th century – the Quatuor Arod honours the woman who became Arnold Schoenberg’s wife in 1901. Mathilde was Zemlinsky’s sister and the dedicatee of her husband’s String Quartet No 2, an innovative work in both its tonal language and its integration of a soprano – here Elsa Dreisig. It was completed in the summer of 1908, a tumultuous period in the Schoenbergs’ marriage.

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Quatuor Arod – Mendelssohn: String Quartets Nos. 2 & 4 – 4 Pieces for String Quartet, Op. 81 (2017) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Quatuor Arod – Mendelssohn: String Quartets Nos. 2 & 4 – 4 Pieces for String Quartet, Op. 81 (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:17:15 minutes | 1,32 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Erato – Warner Classics

For their first recording, the Arod Quartet has selected Mendelssohn, one of the pillars of the quartet’s art, in particular his masterpiece, the Fourth Quartet in E Minor of June 1837 – more Mozartian than Beethovian in its structure and development, to be sure, even if it bears Mendelssohn’s hallmark from the first note to the last. To find the influence of the deaf genius, we have to look in the Second Quartet Op. 13 of 1827, a work written shortly after Beethoven’s death, the full extent of whose innovations Mendelssohn was only just discovering. The Arod Quartet continues its album with Four Pieces for Quartet, assembled posthumously and numbered Op. 81 by Mendelssohn’s successor at the Gewandhaus, Julius Rietz, and based on four disparate pieces from various eras. Finally, the album closes with the Arod’s re-interpretaton of a Lied, sung here by Marianne Crebassa, whose theme takes in several passages from Beethoven note for note, a real homage from the young composer to his illustrious elder. It’s worth noting that the Arod Quartet, only founded in 2013, has shot to global prominence, having performed at the Paris Philharmonic, the Louvre Auditorium, the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, the Metz Arsenal, and further afield the Salzburg Mozarteum, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Zurich Tonhalle, London’s Wigmore Hall, as well as in Tokyo, Finland, Switzerland… the list goes on!

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Quatuor Arod – Death and the Maiden (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Quatuor Arod – Death and the Maiden (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:11:08 minutes | 1,31 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warner Classics

“An outstanding album, was Gramophone magazine’s verdict on the Arod Quartet’s last release, a programme of Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Webern. Remaining in Vienna, the young French quartet goes back to the time of Schubert. “We wanted to explore several stylistic phases in Schubert’s life,” they explain. The centrepiece is his gripping Quartet No 14 (‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’/’Death and the Maiden’), written in the final years of his short life and complemented here by the Quartets No 4 and No 12 (‘Quartettsatz’).

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