Quatuor Voce

Quatuor Voce – Itinéraire (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:15:02 minutes | 685 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Alpha Classics

‘Playing the demanding and constantly shifting string quartet repertory is enough to fill up four lives . . . Buoyed up by this heritage, we wanted to explore less well-known territories. In the early years of the twentieth century, Bartók and Kodály roamed the villages of Hungary and Romania, collecting, transcribing and recording hundreds of folk tunes and songs. ‘Building on a number of encounters with leading figures of jazz and world music, we asked five instrumentalist-composers to write us pieces inspired by musical worlds to which they feel close. In addition to these new compositions, we wanted to record Escalay by the Egyptian oud player Hamza el Din who died in 2006, a nod to the Kronos Quartet whose approach is an inspiration to us.’ (Voce Quartet). A recording made under the artistic direction of Vincent Segal.
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Quatuor Voce – Bartók, Schulhoff & Janáček: Lettres intimes (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:54 minutes | 1,25 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Alpha Classics

The Quatuor Voce, which recently celebrated its tenth anniversary, follows up its two recordings of Mozart with Juliette Hurel ( Alpha 204) and Brahms with Lise Berthaud ( Alpha 214) by inviting us on a journey to central Europe. The three works recorded here were written over a period of twenty years. Two of them allude to their composer’s love lives. Bartók’s First Quartet might be seen as Beethoven’s Quartet no.17. The intense opening Lento is a lyric-dramatic movement that transposes an unhappy experience of love. No previous quartet had come so close to the Beethovenian ideal. Janáček’s Second Quartet reflects his love for Kamila Stösslová, and is a faithful mirror of emotions in all their spontaneous and constantly shifting authenticity. Schulhoff was one of the first Jewish composers to fall victim to Nazi barbarity. Inventive, omnivorously curious, he was a virtuoso pianist who performed both jazz and serial music. His Five Pieces consist of a suite of dances in different styles, successively Alla Valse viennese , Alla Serenata , Alla Czeca , Alla Tango milonga and Alla Tarantella.
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Quatuor Voce – Mozart & Schubert: Quartets Nos. 15 (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:06:40 minutes | 2,12 GB | Genre: Musique de chambre
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Alpha Classics

The Quatuor Voce is fifteen years old! To celebrate this anniversary, the four musicians present an album focusing on two composers, Mozart and Schubert, but only one number: 15! This milestone, an age imbued with both ardour and maturity, is therefore embodied in the respective fifteenth quartets of these two geniuses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Mozart composed his Quartet No. 15 in 1783, as the second in the set of six “Quartets dedicated to Haydn”. Schubert wrote his Quartet No. 15, his last work in the genre, in 1826. He composed it in only ten days but did not live to hear its first performance, which took place twenty-three years after his death. 
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Quatuor Voce – Poétiques de l’instant II: Ravel & Mantovani (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:05:22 minutes | 2,05 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Alpha Classics

This second instalment of our long-term project Poétiques de l’Instant (Poetry of the Moment) combines two masterly string quartets with a range of other instrumental colours, unpublished transcriptions and first performances. Alongside the famous Quartet by Ravel, the Voce Quartet have commissioned a new quartet from Bruno Mantovani – his fifth – which develops around a crucial note in Ravel’s Quartet. They have also drawn on the multiple talents of harpist Emmanuel Ceysson, who enhances the programme with a magical chamber transcription of Ravel’s famous Mother Goose suite. For this arrangement, as well as for Ravel’s equally superb Introduction and Allegro for septet, the Quatuor Voce are joined by three outstanding artists: flautist Juliette Hurel, clarinettist Rémi Delangle and harpist Emmanuel Ceysson.
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