“The String Quartet that Weinberg completed in May 1937 bears no resemblance to the music that young Warsaw composers were fascinated with at that time."
The programme of this album has several threads that allow you to listen to it in many ways.
Seventeen diary entries intertwine in this stage work with interludes marking the passing of time. Time, in turn, is presented in a way that corresponds to the notions and feelings of an energetic young married woman, neither used to domestic duties nor long hours of silence and loneliness.
West Side Sinfonietta: the ensemble is a joint initiative of the musicians of the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic and the Szczecin Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra.
Every composer whose piece appears on this CD was an essential figure in the very best of the late eighteenth- and the early nineteenth-century salon culture.
The composer had written his first string quartet in 1937, while still in Warsaw. After his escape to the Soviet Union in September 1939, he composed more of them, sometimes in ‘series’.
Two people – that’s all it takes to carry on an interesting and inspiring conversation. Two instruments constitute also the smallest possible ensemble – the dialogue.
“I believe that true poetry, worthy of lifelong dedication and utmost attention, of being impatiently awaited and painfully missed […] is impossible except when it encounters the world of that imagination which was once called spirit,”
Whether it referred to the parts with unusual kinds of figuration, like thorns irritating the ears of listeners from those time, or to the person of Pierre Buisson, the composer’s brother-in-law and at the same time his son’s best man when he married Marie Roze Dubois, it is hard to state unequivocally.
World Premiere recording of Józef Elsner’s Three String Quartets Op. 8 performed by Equilibrium String Quartet, on period instruments.