After receiving First Prize at the prestigious Geneva International Competition in 2011, the Hermès Quartet won the Young Concert Artists Auditions in New York in 2012. Since then, a glittering future has beckoned. La Dolce Volta was naturally keen to work with a group so full of delicacy and elegance.
‘Daring a youthful approach to the maturity and madness of Schumann’s Quartets op.41.’ This is how the members of the Hermès Quartet describe their approach to the complete string quartets of Robert Schumann.
Did the composer himself not embark on writing his quartets as if in an amorous embrace, as passionate as it is ephemeral? In its second disc, the Hermès Quartet gives us a complete recording of them in which musical maturity and bold impetuosity go hand in hand, giving a profound, Romantic reading as powerful as it is sensuous.
From the first quartet, influenced by the Classical masters, through the second with its freshness and serenity in a fully emancipated style, to the third in which the composer gives free rein to his unashamed sensibility, the four musicians demonstrate keen musical intelligence, devoid of all striving after effect or distortion of the text: the timbres, the atmospheres, the absolute unity, everything seems natural, almost instinctive, never ‘too much or not enough’.
The overall impression one retains from this luminous first encounter between Schumann and the Hermès Quartet is one of total sincerity. Is that not the very essence of what is required to interpret the composer at his most moving?
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