Ysaÿe Records label

This first disc by the Hermès Quartet couples two major works in the genre, the Quartet op.20 no.5, the jewel of one of Haydn's most prestigious sets, and Beethoven's op.127, the first of his late quartets and generally regarded as the peak of the quartet repertoire.

The Hermès Quartet, founded in 2008 in Lyon, is the winner of 2012 Young Concert Artists International Auditions in New York. It also won First Prize and the Coup de Coeur Breguet Prize at the Geneva International Music Competition in 2011.

The musical identity of the ensemble and the cohesion of its members have been strengthened by working with such musicians as Miguel da Silva (Ysaÿe Quartet); Eberhard Feltz and Arnold Steinhardt (Guarneri Quartet); Valentin Erben and Hatto Beyerle (Alban Berg Quartet) and Walter Levin (LaSalle Quartet). The Hermès Quartet is currently engaged in postgraduate study with the Artemis Quartet and the Ysaÿe Quartet.

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.

Born in Dae-gu in South Korea, Hyo Joo studied piano at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris with Theodor Paraskivesco, Jacques Rouvier and Itamar Golan for music chamber. She also studied under Françoise Thinat at the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris, and then with Matti Raekallio at the University for Music and Performing Arts of Hannover.

She has been winning competitions since the age of 13, including First Prize in the Cincinnatti World Piano Competition, followed by another First Prize in the Young Chopin Competition in Moscow. In 2003, she was a gold medallist at the Piano Campus Competition in Pontoise, and in 2007 she earned Second Prize in the Epinal Competition.

She regularly gives recitals in Italy, Czech Republic, Poland, Austria, France and Japan, and performs in Korea with the finest national orchestras.

In 2012 Hyo Joo won the “Coup de Coeur Breguet” award at the Geneva International Music Competition. The jury awarded South Korea’s Hyo Joo Lee a second prize worth 12,000 francs for her playing of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto in C minor. But Lee, 25, delighted the public more with her sensitive but masterly rendition of one of the great works of late Romanticism, and she took the audience prize voted on by the public in the hall as well as winning a contract to record this portrait CD with orchestra sponsored by Swiss watchmaker Breguet, part of the Swatch Group.

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.

In sum, what differentiates Salieri from Mozart? Talent, genius? Invention, imagination? Let us think about two other Mozarts in the history of art: Pushkin and Vermeer. They have the same sovereign elegance, the same art of dancers to whose eye naturalness is more than a virtue - indeed a condition of life. They have the same fluidity in the sequence of events, the same apparent limited means, the same grace in motion. The same precise cruelty, the same tendreness. They bring the same tears to he eyes, welling up from the same place.

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.

This CD is a collection of historic recordings of the works of Claude Debussy, from a generation of pianists, some of whom were contemporaries of Debussy, reproduced from originals made in the first half of the 20th century on wax cylinders, 78 rpm and long-playing records. It is a joint venture between the Centre de documentation Claude Debussy, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and Ysaye Records, allowing us to observe trends in performing styles and the comparison of several interpretations of the same work.