Quartet 15 by Artea Quartet

Franz Schubert

Artea Quartet

Quartet 15

Price: € 19.95
Format: CD
Label: Champs Hill
UPC: 5060212591432
Catnr: CHRCD 137
Release date: 12 January 2018
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Label
Champs Hill

UPC
5060212591432

Catalogue number
CHRCD 137

Release date
12 January 2018

Album

Artist(s)

Composer(s)

About the album

The members of the Artea quartet met whilst studying at the Royal Academy of Music in London in 2001. After studies with the Amadeus, Alberni and Wihan quartets they went on to forge a successful career, winning many awards and performing at festivals throughout the U.K. including the BBC Proms, and at venues such as the Wigmore Hall and Purcell Room as well as live broadcasts for BBC Radio 3.

With busy solo and orchestral careers, this new recording represents a rare opportunity to hear them in the studio, and the repertoire reflects their desire to take on a challenge: one of the summits of the repertoire, Schubert’s last great String Quartet in G major, No 15. "It is a piece of such enormous scope and exquisite beauty that it is an intimidating peak of the repertoire to scale. It is a sobering thought that Schubert was the same age as us, if not slightly younger, when he composed it.” It was published posthumously in 1851.

Artist(s)

Artea Quartet

The members of the Artea Quartet met whilst studying at the Royal Academy of Music in London in 2001. After studies with the Amadeus, Alberni and Wihan quartets they went on to forge a successful career, winning many awards and performing at festivals throughout the UK including the BBC Proms, and at venues such as the Wigmore Hall and Purcell Room as well as live broadcasts for BBC Radio 3. In addition to their obvious love for quartet-playing the members of the Artea Quartet enjoy a diverse range of music-making on an individual level. Thomas Gould is a soloist and leader of Britten Sinfonia. Rhys Watkins is a member of the first violin section of the London Symphony Orchestra. Benjamin Roskams...

In addition to their obvious love for quartet-playing the members of the Artea Quartet enjoy a diverse range of music-making on an individual level. Thomas Gould is a soloist and leader of Britten Sinfonia. Rhys Watkins is a member of the first violin section of the London Symphony Orchestra. Benjamin Roskams is the violist of the London Conchord Ensemble and a member of the first violin section of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Ashok Klouda is a member of cello octet Cellophony and is also Co-Founder/Director of the Highgate International Chamber Music Festival.

The quartet received critical acclaim for their 2014 recording of Mendelssohn’s Four Pieces for String Quartet for Champs Hill Records.

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Thomas Gould (violin)

Thomas Gould performs as soloist with orchestras worldwide including the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Hallé Orchestra, LA Phil New Music Group, Orchestre Symphonique de Bretagne and West Australian Symphony Orchestra, collaborating with conductors such as John Adams, Nicholas Collon, Paul Daniel and Robin Ticciati. Leader of Aurora Orchestra and associate leader of Britten Sinfonia, Gould appears as soloist and director with both groups and also collaborates regularly with Sinfonietta Riga. Thomas is a guest concertmaster of London Sinfonietta and Mahler Chamber Orchestra, also appearing in the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. The dedicatee of Nico Muhly’s concerto for six string electric violin Seeing is Believing, Thomas's recording of this work for Decca Classics received widespread critical acclaim. His other releases on Champs Hill Records include two albums with his swing band Man Overboard Quintet and one with the Artea Quartet. For Harmonia Mundi, Thomas has recorded Bach’s The Goldberg Variations (in Dmitry Sitkovetsky’s transcription) directing Britten Sinfonia. In 2014 he signed a four- album contract with Edition Classics. Thomas is an associate of the Royal Academy of Music where he studied with György Pauk, and a former Young Concert Artists Trust (YCAT) winner. He plays a 1782 J.B. Guadagnini violin.

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Rhys Watkins (violin)

Benjamin Roskams (viola)

Ashok Klouda (cello)

Composer(s)

Franz Schubert

Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer. Schubert already died before his 32nd birthday, but was extremely prolific during his lifetime. His output consists of over six hundred secular vocal works (mainly Lieder), seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music and a large body of chamber and piano music. Appreciation of his music while he was alive was limited to a relatively small circle of admirers in Vienna, but interest in his work increased significantly in the decades following his death. Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms and other 19th-century composers discovered and championed his works. Today, Schubert is ranked among the greatest composers of the late Classical and early Romantic eras and is one of the most frequently performed composers of the early nineteenth century.
It was in the genre of the Lied that Schubert made his most indelible mark. Prior to Schubert's influence, Lieder tended toward a strophic, syllabic treatment of text, evoking the folksong qualities engendered by the stirrings of Romantic nationalism. Schubert expanded the potentialities of the genre like no other composer before.

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