Brahms: String Quartet No. 1 in C minor, Op. 51 No. 1

Founded in 2002 the young Arcanto Quartet comprises four musicians who first made their names as soloists, making significant contributions to harmonia mundi's artist roster. In their second recording for hm as a quartet, they present Brahms mature Op. 51.Their first disc was awarded Gramophone Editor's Choice and was cited as one of the Telegraph's Discs of the Year.

New recordings by the Takács Quartet on Hyperion have become important landmarks in the musical calendar. This second disc of Brahms string quartets looks set to repeat all the commercial and critical success of their first.

It took twenty years for the famously self-critical Brahms to release his Op 51 string quartets for publication. Despite frequent requests, they were held back until they had reached his requisite standard of perfection. It is clear that Brahms’s struggle with the string quartet medium eventually led him to find an intensely personal language for it, with an unmistakable originality of melody and texture. Op 51 No 1 is both suffused with great musical richness and organically unified, with each idea growing with unerring logic out of the last in a process of continual development, and the main subject of each movement clearly arising out of the same germ.

Having hesitated so long over his first two string quartets, Brahms managed to produce their successor, Op 67, without any protracted birth-pangs, and the fact that the new work was dedicated to a well-known physician prompted him to elaborate on the medical analogy. ‘I am’, he told Theodor Wilhelm Engelmann (the husband of the pianist Emma Brandes, and himself a keen amateur cellist) ‘publishing a string quartet, and may need a doctor for it (as with the first ones). This quartet rather resembles your wife—very dainty, but brilliant! … It’s no longer a question of a forceps delivery; but of simply standing by. There’s no cello solo in it, but such a tender viola solo that you may want to change your instrument for its sake!’

The string quartets of Brahms demonstrate his perfectionism: he wrote dozens of works in the genre, but rejected all but three, and worked at the first one for twenty long years before publishing it. Even the famous Piano Quintet Op. 34 was rewritten several times for various formations before it was published in its final version, whose achievement is today undisputed. These works stepped out of Beethoven's shadow to take a firm place in musical history.

Since its formation in Madrid in 1997, Cuarteto Casals has achieved recognition as one of Europe's most distinguished string quartets.The group came to public attention when it won first prize at both the 2000 London International Competition and the 2002 Brahms International Competition. It now performs regularly in the finest halls in London, Paris, Berlin,Vienna, Zurich,Amsterdam, Madrid, New York and Tokyo, and has appeared at such festivals as Salzburg and Lucerne.The quartet has accompanied the King of Spain on state visits and performed at the Royal Palace of Madrid on the royal family's set of matched Stradivarius instruments. Cuarteto Casals was honoured in 2005 with the Prize of the City of Barcelona, in 2006 with the Spanish National Music Award and in 2008 with the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award. Claudio Martínez Mehner studied in Madrid, Moscow, Freiburg, Como and Baltimore with Joaquín Soriano, Dmitri Bashkirov,Vitalij Margulis and Leon Fleisher. He has won first prizes in international competitions at Saragossa and Milan and at the Fondation Chimay (Belgium). For many years now he has performed extensively as both soloist and chamber musician in Europe, the USA and Asia.

Brahms laboured long and hard over the composition of his string quartets but the effort paid off in abundance with resulting masterpieces of the chamber music repertoire. The Auryn Quartet were formed in 1981.They have an exclusive contract with TACET and have recorded music by Beethoven, Haydn and Britten, receiving many awards and international critical acclaim.

For their second Virgin Classics release the members of the Quatuor Ebène turn from the native French repertoire of their first release (Debussy, Ravel, Fauré) to music firmly in the Austro-German tradition, Brahms’ first string quartet and first piano quartet. Joining them for the quintet is the Japanese pianist Akiko Yamamoto; when the five musicians played the piece together in London in 2006, the Independent newspaper had the following to say: “This talented group wound up their concert with a brilliant performance of Brahms' Piano Quintet in F minor, with the piano acting as a firm anchor, while the strings sang their hearts out. Come back soon.”

The Ebène’s debut on Virgin Classics, the programme of French quartets released in September, has been receiving high praise: “Three French masterpieces (Debussy, Fauré, Ravel) played by young musicians with a rare degree of expressive subtlety, blended sonorities and electrifying joy. The late Fauré quartet achieves a fine balance between sounding suave and pulsing with life. Debussy quivers with febrile emotions, while the Ravel soars to heaven with refinement and poise,” said The Times, awarding the recording five stars. Also in the UK the Independent described the quartet as: “a Gallic equivalent of the Kronos Quartet, a widely acclaimed, award-winning group of young players whose dynamism and open-minded versatility is helping transform French classical music ... This set encompassing the principal string quartets of early-20th-century French music demonstrates something of the breadth and intensity of their abilities, not least in the different emphases they place on the passages, disruptively blending bowed and pizzicato notes which characterise the second movements of Debussy's String Quartet in G Minor and Ravel's String Quartet in F Major. Ravel modelled his piece as a homage to the earlier composition, and it's in the striking dynamic range which, despite its restricted pace, the Quatuor Ebène bring to the très lent third movement that best demonstrates their elegant command of the material. In Fauré's String Quartet in E Minor, they brilliantly negotiate the contrast between the melancholy cast of the first two movements and the more contented, even animated tone of the final movement, by allowing the lingering impressions of the second movement's see-sawing undulations to haunt the rest of the piece. “

The Debussy quartet also featured in the Quatuor Ebène’s programme at last year’s 2008 Salzburg Festival, eliciting the following reactions from leading Austrian media:

“The quartet plays on a sensational technical level with a commitment that assures expressivity for every note, keeping the overall sound lush and colourful while also providing a well-rounded harmonic subtlety. The very first bars of the Debussy quartet gave evidence of the application, fascinating in its clarity, of a pastel artist’s technique, illuminating the polyphonic connections ... [and] squaring, so to speak, the quartet circle, a feat which this ensemble, though still young, carries off in masterly fashion. Moreover, the Quatuor Ebène ensures that scrupulously conceived musical structures are also sensuous in quality, and the musicians are sensitive to the play of tensions in directional chordal shadings – that beauty in dissonance, so to speak, which can so captivate the listener.” (Die Presse)

“In the space of just a few years [the Quatuor Ebène] has made its way to become one of the world’s top quartets. Beyond youthful French charm, the quartet is notable for its distinctive musical approach and technical supremacy. From its first bars, Claude Debussy’s G minor quartet fascinated with is variety of colours, delicate nuances and the specific sensibility of sound. For all the loving attention to detail, there was a sense of scale and passion. Vibrato was used sparingly, but in absolutely the right way. It is unusual for a quartet to be cheered after the first work in its programme, but that was the case on this occasion.

Naturally the Quatuor Ebène has a special connection with the spirit and tonal precision of the French repertoire, but its interpretations in other idioms are also on the highest level.” (Salzburger Nachrichten)