Quatuor Hanson

Quatuor Hanson – Haydn: String Quartets (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:15:50 minutes | 2,08 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Aparté

Six quartets: six works that are key to understanding what Joseph Haydn brought to western music. This effort by the Quatuor Hanson is particularly successful because they are past masters in constructing and expressing the soul of this subtle art. And what’s more, they bring it off with a fascinating level of instrumental skill. Listening to this piece, we have to bow down once again before the genius of a composer who, along with Boccherini, invented a new genre and immediately studded it with masterpieces of staggering quality.
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Quatuor Hanson – Not all cats are grey (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:59 minutes | 1,02 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Aparté

When it comes to French string quartets, Autumn 2021 has been notably nocturnal-flavoured. First there was the superb “round midnight” from the genre’s rockstars, Quatuor Ébène – a programme of music for after dark that paired Dutilleux’s Ainsi la nuit of 1976 with a quartet arrangement of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (1899), bridged by a new jazz-infused work by the quartet’s cellist-composer Raphaël Merlin. Now here’s “Not all cats are grey” from one of France’s most exciting new generation quartets, Quatuor Hanson, whose own night-themed trio of works has the Dutilleux sitting at its climax, preceded by Bartók’s String Quartet in A minor of 1917 – metaphorically representing a dark time for Europe, and studied by Dutilleux before he wrote his own quartet – and Ligeti’s String Quartet No 1 “Métamorphoses nocturnes” of 1954.
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