Arnold Schoenberg

This is the first time the quartet ever recorded a work by Arnold Schoenberg.

It is also the first time in almost 30 years they have recorded a work by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky; they have never recorded "Souvenir de Florence".

“The repertoire selection is simple but evocative:

‘Verklärte Nacht’ is a journey of love and forgiveness, where moonlight shimmers to light and helps transfigure the night”

‘Souvenir de Florence’ is a work of uncommon beauty and excitement, but also of darkness lying beneath its often bright surface” (Phil Setzer)

The album was recorded in September 2012 in LeFrak Auditorium at Queen's College in New York City, with the same producer/engineer that the quartet has worked with for the past 14 years, Da-Hong Seetoo.

International release is scheduled for May 2013 to coincide with a concerts featuring the CD’s programme, at Carnegie Hall in New York. The cover is part of a picture painted by the quartet's violinist Phil Setzer's daughter. The Emerson String Quartet stands alone in the history of string quartets with an incomparable list of achievements over three decades: nine Grammy® Awards (including two for Best Classical Album, an unprecedented honor for a chamber music group); three Gramophone Awards; the coveted Avery Fisher Prize and an international reputation for groundbreaking chamber music projects including cycles of the complete Beethoven, Bartók, Mendelssohn and Shostakovich string quartets in the world's musical capitals.

The Quartet has collaborated in concerts and on recordings with some of the greatest artists of our time. After 36 years of extensive touring, the Emerson Quartet continues to perform with the same benchmark integrity, energy and commitment that it has demonstrated since it was formed in 1976.

Italian pianist Pina Napolitano performs Schoenberg’s complete piano works, in a rendition that, fully realizing the scores in all their complexity, animates the music and makes it dance, and “conveys its real quality as music - rather than as an object of academic study” (Guy Rickards).

“A romanticism so exasperated that the usual musical indications of expressivity cannot convey it; each note is signed, tormentingly and assiduously, with indications that do nothing but speak to the insufficiency of language and of writing - of every language and every writing, even of the most absolute, the musical language - to express the idea and the thought, the sensation and the still indistinct feeling. Such a concentrated and dolorous romanticism, so essential, that it takes your breath away, a romanticism of the mind and of the heart, in which to feel and to think are not distinct.”

Dutch violinist Janine Jansen presents a new album coupling two of the most heart-felt masterpieces of the Viennese romantic repertoire.

Schubert’s last and greatest chamber work, the sublime String Quintet in C major, is contrasted with the young Schoenberg’s earliest masterpiece, Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night).

For this recording, derived from emotionally charged live performances given in Dortmund in May 2012, Janine Jansen is joined by a group of exceptional young musicians who are all close personal friends as well as fellow members of Spectrum Concerts Berlin, the prestigious German chamber music group with whom Jansen has played since 1998. Alongside Swedish cellist Torleif Thedéen and Ukrainian viola player Maxim Rysanov, who both joined Jansen for her 2007 Bach album, they include Russian-born violinist Boris Brovtsyn, Israeli violist Amihai Grosz and German cellist Jens Peter Maintz.

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.