Quatuor Ysaÿe

On Thursday, November 1st, 2012, after performing the entire corpus of Beethoven's String Quartets at the Pays de Fayence String Quartet Festival in the South of France, the Ysaÿe Quartet announced that it was bringing its 30-year career to an end in January 2014. The 14 months ahead are to be devoted a major series of concerts, with a special emphasis on the music of Beethoven.

Founded in 1984 by a group of students at the Paris Conservatoire, the Quartet took its name from Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931), a violinist, chamber musician and composer whose influence is still felt today. From the start and more especially after winning First Prize at the prestigious Evian String Quartet Competition in 1988, the Ysaÿe Quartet has stood at the pinnacle of the international chamber music scene, on a par with such legendary formations as the LaSalle and Amadeus Quartets that provided an inspiration for its work. It has brought an open-minded, committed and unfussy approach, characteristic of great playing, to a wide range of repertoires, from Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven to contemporary composers, who have often written specially for it, such as Boucourechliev, Dusapin, Tanguy, Krawczyk, Escaich, Fraisse or Cerha. At the same time, teaching commitments have long been a central part of the Quartet's activities. In 1993, Miguel da Silva persuaded his colleagues to join him in setting up a specific String Quartet course at the Paris National Conservatoire (now the Paris Regional Conservatoire). This was a national first. Ysaÿe's students, both French (Psophos, Ebène, Modigliani, Voce, Hermès, Girard, Zaïde and Varèse) and international (Aviv of Israel, Incanto of Switzerland, Difference of Latvia) have won major awards around the world. Today, alongside alto player and founder member, Miguel da Silva, Ysaÿe consists of violinists Guillaume Sutre and Luc-Marie Aguera and cello player Yovan Markovitch.

The Ysaÿe Quartet's recordings have won innumerable French and international awards.

On Thursday, November 1st, 2012, after performing the entire corpus of Beethoven's String Quartets at the Pays de Fayence String Quartet Festival in the South of France, the Ysaÿe Quartet announced that it was bringing its thirty-year career to an end in January 2014.

The fourteen months ahead are to be devoted a major series of concerts, with a special emphasis on the music of Beethoven.

Founded in 1984 by a group of students at the Paris Conservatoire, the Quartet took its name from Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931), a violinist, chamber musician and composer whose influence is still felt today.

From the start and more especially after winning First Prize at the prestigious Evian String Quartet Competition in 1988, the Ysaÿe Quartet has stood at the pinnacle of the international chamber music scene, on a par with such legendary formations as the LaSalle and Amadeus Quartets that provided an inspiration for its work. It has brought an open-minded, committed and unfussy approach, characteristic of great playing, to a wide range of repertoires, from Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven to contemporary composers, who have often written specially for it. At the same time, teaching commitments have long been a central part of the Quartet's activities. In 1993, Miguel da Silva persuaded his colleagues to join him in setting up a specific String Quartet course at the Paris National Conservatoire (now the Paris Regional Conservatoire). This was a national first. Ysaÿe's students, both French (Psophos, Ebène, Modigliani, Voce, Hermès, Girard, Zaïde and Varèse) and international (Aviv of Israel, Incanto of Switzerland, Difference of Latvia) have won major awards around the world.

Debussy’s most popular and famous piano piece opens this generously-filled 2-CD programme of piano and orchestral works by the great French composer; Clair de lune is also heard in an orchestral version which opens CD 2.

Pecuniary difficulties seem to have been at the root of the six quartets which Haydn began composing in the early summer of 1788. Normally meticulous and thoughtful in his work, Haydn here showed himself singulary capable of swift, instinctive writing. He went straight to the heart of the problem, concentrating his efforts and distilling music from sudden flashes of inspiration.

Schumann imbues his string quartets with an expressive aspect which is found nowhere else in his output, revealing his secret garden as well as what might be the calmer part of his inner self. His Opus 41 also bears the double stamp of overflow and restraint, and is without doubt one for the most highly developed examples of symbiosis between the expressive needs of romanticism and the formal demands of writing for sixteen strings.

Both of these quartets appeared in the wake of the long wave that had begun in the 1880's and which witnessed the blossoming of a veritable chamber music school in France. The Ysaÿe Quartet gives a remarkable readings of these two masterpieces of 20th Century French Music.

When we are dealing with a personality of Beethoven's stature, the discovery of new works goes beyond the interest of mere exhumation and can constitute a genuine event or enable us to penetrate the secrets of the composer's laboratory. This is the case with the five short individual pieces for string quartet or quintet which appear on this CD; they accompany two scores that are better known but still deserve a higher profile, the Quintet Op.29 (a materpiece) an the Quartet in F major Hess 34.