Bela Bartók: String Quartets Nos. 1, 3 & 5
Jerusalem Quartet
[No. 1] opens in a state of lonely desolation, and the feeling of suspense is superbly captured by the Jerusalems, who also find the earthy folksiness to remind us that Bartók’s language is...
Bela Bartók: String Quartets Nos. 1, 3 & 5
Jerusalem Quartet
Purchase product
[No. 1] opens in a state of lonely desolation, and the feeling of suspense is superbly captured by the Jerusalems, who also find the earthy folksiness to remind us that Bartók’s language is...
About
From the opening funeral dirge of the Quartet No.1 to the incandescent frenzy that concludes the fifth, this disc offers a genuine panorama of the Bartókian universe. It's a world unto itself, constantly stamped with the heritage of Hungarian folklore so dear to the composer. Two years after a first volume devoted to the even-numbered works (Nos. 2, 4 and 6), the musicians of the Jerusalem Quartet expertly complete their recording of a key cycle of modern chamber music, a musical saga drawn on the scale of a lifetime.
Contents and tracklist
Awards and reviews
February 2021
[No. 1] opens in a state of lonely desolation, and the feeling of suspense is superbly captured by the Jerusalems, who also find the earthy folksiness to remind us that Bartók’s language is rooted in multi-ethnic Transylvania. Equally impressive in the Fifth…they play the finale with whirling virtuosity…They also meet all the technical innovations of the Third, but this is where my slight reservation creeps in: such highly cultivated playing as the Jerusalems produce perhaps renders the work’s strangeness not quite mesmerising enough.
