Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4 (Transfigured Night)

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.

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.

Recent releases of broadcast performances by the legendary conductor Leopold Stokowski on the Guild Historical have proved enormously successful and have received glowing praise from the critics worldwide. In this remarkable double-album we bring together two of Stokowski's momentous performances - one live, one studio - of the music of Arnold Schoenberg. It is a little-known fact that Stokowski was the only conductor to perform all of Schoenberg's orchestral music during the composer's lifetime, and he conducted the world premieres of two of the composer's greatest works - the Violin Concerto and the Piano Concerto. In 1961, he led a truly overwhelming account of Schoenberg's great 'Gurrelieder', of which Stokowski had given the US premiere in 1932; nine years before, he made this fabled recording of 'Verklaerte Nacht' with a hand-picked orchestra. The result is an issue of the highest importance, and the booklet notes are by Stokowski himself.

In October 1988 Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic made a five-day tour of Vienna, Paris and London. 40 years had passed since he had first conducted in London in April 1948. During those years audiences throughout the world had flocked to his concerts. True, there was a half-empty hall in Vienna one raw February evening in 1948 when he programmed Reger’s Mozart Variations with the Seventh Symphony of his beloved Sibelius; and only a handful of people were present in London’s Royal Albert Hall in November 1949 to hear him conduct a critically acclaimed Beethoven Ninth. But as the years passed the words ‘Karajan’ and ‘Sold Out’ became more or less synonymous. As physical frailty began to manifest itself in the early 1980s, and the painful spinal condition that had nearly cost him his life in the winter of 1975-76 became ever more problematic, a feeling spread abroad that each new visit might be the last. This was certainly the case in London on 6 October 1988 – albeit mingled with a sense that having survived thus far this dauntless octogenarian might well go on and on. It was not to be. This would indeed be his final London concert. Unbeknown to the audience arriving at the Royal Festival Hall that evening, the concert itself hung in the balance. The players were present but their instruments, which were being transported by road from Paris, had been delayed by industrial action in France. With the help of a high-speed police escort from Dover, they arrived at the hall at 8pm. The concert began, an hour late, at 9. Why hadn’t the instruments been airlifted from France, grumbled one critic, noting the sky-high ticket prices and sponsorship by a leading bank. He had a point, though those in the hall were more relieved than aggrieved, impressed by what one wag dubbed the Berliners’ ‘Dunkirk spirit’. If the orchestra was tired and on edge, it hardly showed. Sunday Telegraph critic Malcolm Hayes observed: ‘It is a measure of the greatness of the orchestra and of its conductor Herbert von Karajan, that after such an exasperating pre-concert hiatus – which had prevented the chance of even a quick rehearsal in the Festival Hall – they delivered performances of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht and Brahms’s First Symphony that justified every superlative in the book’. Extract from the note © Richard Osborne, 2008