Mozart : Quatuors à Cordes KV 458, KV 499, KV 589

Description

In 2018, we won the Salzburg Mozart Competition, an event that truly launched our career. Since that day, we have enjoyed a long companionship with Mozart. Playing Mozart as a family is a privilege; few composers have practiced music as much within the family, something we feel instinctively and naturally. We grew up with his music and his music grew within us, leading us to a completely renewed approach to his style. We explored, deconstructed, chose, and finally recorded in this album a thousand possibilities of interpretation. We chose three emblematic works presenting three different facets of the Mozartian art of the quartet. Two of them are in B flat major, but look in totally different directions. KV 458, with its almost playful spirit, comes to soothe the listener after the tragic KV 421 in D minor that precedes it in the cycle dedicated to Haydn. KV 589, for its part, is constantly on edge, as if suspended, on the brink of the precipice. One senses Mozart on a tightrope, in search of a new style. The constraint of emphasizing the role of the cello, which he had previously shown relatively little interest in, pushes him to rebalance the relationships between the voices by giving, perhaps for the first time, truly equal importance to the quartet’s four voices. This results in a transparency and a polyphonic richness that will fully bear fruit in his last chamber masterpieces, the string quintets KV 593 and KV 614. The “Hoffmeister” quartet offers an imperious and deceptively bright D major, in which the viola occupies a central role, with its rich timbre, both in stating themes and in the expressive counter-melodies. The finale of this quartet surprises us with its chromaticism, its questioning, its silences, and its interruptions. One understands how impressed Beethoven was by this movement, to the point of drawing heavily on it for the finale of his Quartet op.18 no.3.