Bartók, Béla - Landscapes
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Joseph Haydn is a conscientious revolutionary. His “Sunrise” Quartet op. 76 No. 4 is littered with idiosyncrasies. Just as you are thinking you can get the hang of this music, it slips away from you again. The Schumann Quartet is hooked on Joseph Haydn! There’s a reason for this addiction, of course; without Haydn, the “string quartet” genre would be like a string instrument without a bow. True, the composer is still – somewhat disrespectfully – called “Papa Haydn”, whether to stress his place in the evolutionary chain linking Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadé Mozart or because his works allegedly lack the inquisitiveness of a Mozart or the philosophical profundities of a Ludwig van Beethoven. Joseph Haydn has yet to recover from such false assessments. And it is abundantly clear from the “Sunrise” Quartet op. 76 No. 4 just how false they are. It may not be obvious to the listener, because it is not at all easy listening. All our expectations of the four-movement form are fulfi lled, but the work is littered with idiosyncrasies. Some of them are right at the beginning of the composition, when the fi rst violin responds to the sustained notes of the remaining instruments by describing a discursively rising and then falling pattern. Is it sombre? Is it encouraging? Is it playful? Perhaps it all depends on the listener’s reaction to it. The fi nal movement, putting everything in a new light with its minor-key interpolations, shows how careful one must be not to stuff Haydn into a pigeonhole.The three brothers Mark, Erik and Ken Schumann, who grew up in the Rhineland, have been playing together for fi ve years. In 2012, they were joined by violist Liisa Randalu, who was born in the Estonian capital, Tallinn, and grew up in Karlsruhe, Germany. Those who experience the quartet in performance often remark on the strong connection between its members. The four musicians enjoy the way they communicate without words: how a single look suffices to convey how the other wants to play a particular passage. Although the individual personalities clearly manifest themselves, a common space arises in every musical work in a process of spiritual metamorphosis. The quartet’s openness and curiosity may be partly the result of the formative influence exerted on it by teachers such as Eberhard Feltz, or partners such as Menahem Pressler. CD publications, study with the Alban Berg Quartet, a residency of many years at the RobertSchumannSaal in Düsseldorf, winning the prestigious Concours de Bordeaux along with other awards, various teachers and musical partners – it is always tempting to speculate on what factors have led to many people viewing the Schumann Quartet as one of the best in the world. But the four musicians themselves regard these stages more as encounters, as a confirmation of the path they have taken. They feel that their musical development over the past two years represents a quantum leap: “We really want to take things to extremes, to see how far the excitement and our spontaneity as a group take us,”