Brahms: String Quartet No. 3 in B flat major, Op. 67

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.

Brahms’ standing among the world’s greatest classical composers is confirmed by his inclusion, together with Bach and Beethoven, in the ‘Three Bs’ triumvirate. A leading figure of the Romantic period who excelled in almost every form, he was particularly renowned for his contributions to chamber music; this release details four such examples, all expertly performed by the Juilliard Quartet.

As with the symphony, Brahms was very conscious of the tradition that lay behind the genre of the string quartet, and it is said that he spent the better part of a decade working on Op.51. While No.1 is known for its gritty intensity – brilliantly captured in this recording – No.2, which looks back to Beethoven’s Op.18 through its first movement’s impeccable sonata-allegro form, was written along altogether more lyrical lines. The work presents an engaging follow-up to the experimental Third Quartet in Bb major and is wonderfully complemented by the ensuing Clarinet Quintet Op.115. Here a spirit of mellow reflection comes to the fore, providing a perfect ending to a delightful collection.

The Juilliard String Quartet is one of the longest establishd chamber ensembles, renowned for the interpretative clarity of a range of repertoire from Beethoven to Elliott Carter, and their account of these works – some of Brahms’ most famous – has been described as ‘the stuff of charismatic greatness’. Featuring exemplary playing from clarinettist Neidich, this compilation brims with colour and expression.

Recorded in the 1990s.

Last year the Juilliard Quartet received a Grammy Award for Lifetime Achievement.

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!’

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.