Quatuor à cordes Sérénade et sextuor

Description

Educator, first-rate pianist, but it must be admitted, Ernö Dohnányi was primarily the great composer of Hungarian post-romanticism. His abundant chamber music, immersed in folklore and Hungarian landscapes, is among the most refined that emerged during the interwar period: the pastoral "Giocoso" of the Third Quartet, with its delightfully tipsy final movement, is a gem too rarely performed. The Nash strings, featuring Lawrence Power on viola, aptly place it at the center of their album, a happy opus that will soon give way to the storms and sound explorations of the absolute masterpiece by its composer: the grand "Sextet for piano, clarinet, horn, and string quartet," in fact a Serenade in four movements with complex contrapuntal writing, dark atmospheres, and intense discourse. The English musicians paint surprising landscapes like Whistler, infusing its dense and adventurous pages with stunning sonic imagination, and suddenly Dohnányi is no longer this conservative composer but, like Enescu, an adventurer in the art of sound. Listen to the album in reverse to realize the distance that separates the "Sextet" from the "Serenade" for strings of 1902, a happy pastoral that the war has not yet disturbed, with such clear writing, then return to the "Allegro appassionato" of the Sextet. Splendid album (Discophilia - Artalinna.com). (Jean-Charles Hoffelé)