Described by the New York Times as “a string quartet that can easily morph into a jazz band” the Ebène Quartet - Ensemble of the Year at the Midem Awards 2010 – presents a programme of 16 pop and jazz tracks, with guest appearances from a quartet of female stars: soprano Natalie Dessay, jazz singer Stacey Kent, film icon Fanny Ardant and Spanish pop star Luz Casal.

The Ebène’s first Virgin Classics CD, quartets by Debussy, Ravel and Fauré, was Gramophone’s 2009 Record of the Year, also winning Germany’s Echo Klassik Award 2009, Belgium’s Prix Caecilia 2009 and a French Victoire de la Musique 2010, but this new collection, Fiction, sees them setting their special stamp on numbers from the pop and jazz repertoire.

“In everything we have been willing to do musically –- during all that time spent practising Haydn, Beethoven or Bartók –- there has always been a concealed dream of improvising and creating a new approach to playing string quartet,” confess the members of the multi-award-winning Ebène Quartet. This album brings that dream out into the open.

Its 16 tracks embrace figures as diverse as Charlie Chaplin, Bruce Springsteen, Chick Corea, Harold Arlen, Wayne Shorter, Lennon & McCartney, Brad Mehldau and, in the title track, Nicholas Roubanis, composer of the main theme to Quentin Tarantino’s career-defining film, Pulp Fiction. Guest appearances are made by Virgin Classics’ resident diva Natalie Dessay, American jazz singer Stacey Kent, iconic French actress Fanny Ardant (who proved a sexy chanteuse in the 2002 movie Huit femmes), Spanish pop star Luz Casal and drummer Richard Héry. The quartet’s members even do some singing themselves, with viola-player Mathieu Herzog taking the vocal lead in Springsteen’s ‘Streets of Philadelphia’ and all four performing a cappella in their rendition (en français) of ‘Someday my prince will come,” from Walt Disney’s Snow White – which has formed a surprise encore in such august venues as London’s Wigmore Hall.

Pierre Colombet, the quartet’s leader, explains that: “As an ensemble we try to be as broad in our repertoire choices as possible. Genres like pop and jazz are often overlooked by the classical world because classical music is so intelligent, but when other musical genres are played really well they can also reveal treasures. This is why it is important for us to play jazz and other styles of music for a classical audience – because it introduces them to something new; and equally jazz and pop audiences can discover that classical instruments are capable of different sounds. Our jazz-playing also helps to inform our classical performance. It enables us to look at the score from a different perspective and to see classical music as a kind of improvisation. We like to be as free as possible in our performance and for every concert to be slightly different.”