Tchaikovsky wrote little in the way of chamber music but left three masterpieces: the Piano Trio, Op.50, Sextet “Souvenir de Florence”, Op.70, both of them 'tombeaux' in memory of departed friends, and the third and final Quartet, in the strange, feverish key of E flat minor, of which Chopin was fond, in memory of violinist Ferdinand Laub (1832-1875). At the first performance, the Andante funebre e doloroso had reduced the audience to tears. The Párkányís, the resurrection of the Orlandos of 1976-84, again find a smile with a youthful Quartet Movement, in homage to the masters of the genre: Beethoven and Schubert.

PRD/DSD 250 215

PRD 250 108

Hans KRAZA : 30 November 1899 (Prague) - 18 October 1944 (KZ Auschwitz-Birkenau)

Auschwitz-Birkenau : http://www.auschwitz.org.pl/

Terezin-Memorial : http://www.pamatnik-terezin.cz/

Yad Vashem : http://www.yadvashem.org/

Mes musiques régénérées (jewish music ) : http://claude.torres1.perso.sfr.fr/

PRD 205 106

In Terezin during the concert conducted by Karel Ancerl (1943)

PRD 250 141

The composer of Julietta left seven string quartets that do not, by any means, form a cycle but rather a succession of testimonies stretching from 1920 to 1947. Here are juxtaposed a ‘modern canvas painted’ in 1925 (Quartet No.2), a neo-Baroque divertimento (Quartet No.4) from the spring of 1937, and finally, the unexpected masterpiece, intimate and violent (No.5, 1938), the da camera counterpart of the Double Concerto for Two String Orchestras, Piano and Timpani that Martinů had just finished for Paul Sacher.

PRD/DSD 250 205

CZECH NONET (H 374)

Jirí SKUHRA, flute/Flöte/flûte, Jirí KREJCI, oboe/Oboe/hautbois (H 315, 325), Aleš HUSTOLES, clarinet/Klarinete/clarinette, Pavel LANGPAUL, bassoon/Fagott/basson, Vladimíra KLANSKÁ, french horn/Horn/cor, Jana HERAJNOVA, violin/Violine, Jan NYKRYN, viola/Bratsche/alto,Vladan KOCI, cello/ Violoncello/ violoncelle, Michal RYCHLÝ, double-bass/Kontrabaß/contrebasse.

PRD 250 097

Three of the six ‘Haydn’ Quartets in which, like instrumental mini-operas, Mozart achieves perfection in the individualisation of voices and ‘work on lyric continuity’. Here the most vehement emotion coexists with the rigueur an evolving form in the K. 421. With ‘The Hunt’, he pretends to come back to the galant style so as to better ridicule it with a thoroughly ‘Haydnian’ humour and mastery of speech. Only the K. 465 begins with a slow introduction—whose famous ‘dissonances’ put off the subscribers of the era—that contrasts with the luminous style of the rest of the work. A novelty: the symphonic ‘amplification’ of the closing movements that sweep away the traditional rondos and all-too-human miasmas with an irresistible need for triumph with an almost-insolent ‘Donjuanism’.

PRD/DSD 250 242

An anthology of Mozart’s only original works for flute, initiated by a commission by a ‘Dutchman from the Indies’, an amateur flautist to whom we also owe the Quartet in D and the Concerto in G, taking inspiration from and paying tribute to the instrumentalist-composers pf the Mannheim School, in particular his host, Johann Baptist Wendling (1723-1797), a talented flautist and emulator of Quantz. Yoshimi Oshima returns to the capital of Bohemia and his friends from the Kocian Quartet to record these summits of the Classical literature for transverse flute with a single key (notes with sharps) with a full and even sonority, accurate and virtuoso, that would have delighted the composer.

PRD/DSD 250 255

Record Geijutsu

 

PRD 250 137

Thanks to a first violin and a cello who are stylists of equal excellence, the PRAŽÁK QUARTET displays a plenitude and a way of playing that is both wholly refined and emphatic, in the lineage of the Galimir or Kolisch Quartets. These musicians play Mozart exactly as they would Schönberg and Webern, favouring the qualities of structure as much as colour and a highly modern sense of rhythm. There is an often incredible freedom to which one ought to send back the impudent partisans of a so-called ‘neo-Baroque’ Mozart, along with the imprudent detractors of Mozart’s last period, which managed to treat the cruellest melancholy ‘lightly’, but not without a primitive ruggedness

PRD 250 026