Description

Few genres in music tend to be as traditional and conservative as the string quartet. Its repertoire is vast and features music of all styles since the 17th century. The core-repertoire from Haydn, Beethoven through to Bartók and Schostakowitsch dominates the stage. Unfortunately we still meet producers who stubbornly reject an expansion of the repertoire and refuse contemporary music or even a new idea of how to play a Haydn quartet today. We believe that the versatility of stringquartet music will save the genre from a premature fate. One lifetime is too short to play everything that has been written for quartet. So if we play, it should be the music that appeals to us most, if it be a fourvoice invention of the renaissance, late Beethoven, Erwin Schulhoff or Astor Piazzolla. Those who look at Piazzolla`s life and compositions closely without just listening to his »hits«, will be amazed what a rollercoaster ride he went through. He grew up with jazz; the traditional tango fed him for a long time. With Alberto Ginastera he conquered classical and new music and left Argentinia and finally, the composer Nadja Boulanger led him to his destiny to give the tango a new definition.

As with any good music, the result had to go through a time of evolvement that certainly has not come to an end yet. Encounters with the Argentinian musicians Giora Feidman (clarinet) and Michael Zisman (bandoneon) have helped us to understand tango as a »foreign« culture much better. We hope that every listener will feel this inspiration on this CD. Michael Zisman recorded with us those »Tango Sensations«, that seemed specially important to Piazzolla. They sound different from what we normaly expect from him. They are intimate, vulnerable, uniquely his, painful, sometimes angry. They are always the work of a great composer who honestly shows what he feels.