+Bonus Extra 56 mins: A concert filmed by multicameras on 8 April 2001 at The Bouffes du Nord in Paris. Beethoven's Great Fugue was filmed during this concert but is shown in the documentary only.
The Artemis Quartet appeared in a motion picture early in its career, playing in an EMI production in 1996 as guests of the Alban Berg Quartet in Bruno Monsaingeon's feature-length documentary named after Schubert's quartet of the same name – Death and the Maiden. Five years later the Artemis Quartet once again performed in another film by the renowned director. Monsaingeon's 2001 documentary on Beethoven's Grosse Fuge Op.133: Strings Attached is at the same time an impressive portrait of the Artemis Quartet and illustrates how the Quartet live and work together. At the 2008 Gramophone Awards, the Artemis Quartet were awarded the Chamber Award for their recording of the Piano Quintets by Brahms and Schumann with Leif Ove Andsnes.
“Contemporary music used to be a Cinderella at the Wigmore Hall, cropping up only when a particular performer had an enthusiasm for it. But the management now clearly wants to put the Wigmore on the map as a place to hear new music. The boldest initiative so far has been to build a series of five concerts round the music of the young German composer Jörg Widmann, who's barely known in this country. On the evidence of Wednesday night's concert, given by the Artemis Quartet, they've picked a winner…After the interval they returned for Schubert's Death and the Maiden quartet. Some quartets try to capture this piece's tragic quality by being utterly unbending. These players wisely went the other way. By letting the music breathe in the first three movements, they made the grim fateful onrush of the finale seem all the more electrifying.” Rating **** The Daily Telegraph
Region Code: NTSC 0
Subtitles: F, E
Booklet: F, GB, D
Disc Format: 1 DVD 9
No of Discs: 1
Run Time: 56 mins + 56 mins Bonus
Released: 2009-01-01
June 2009
****
“We see them discussing Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, Op. 133, the most flabbergasting music he ever wrote, and for the last quarter-hour we see them give a public performance of it, hair-raising in its difficulty and eternal modernity. Watching it played close up adds to the force of the work, at the same time as it makes it almost unendurable in its frenetic, disruptive energy. ...an absorbing disc.”
Click on any of the works listed above for alternative recordings.
