Biography

Florian Schötz  -  violin
Pinchas Adt  -  violin
Christopher Vandory  -  viola
Raphael Paratore  -  cello

“The Goldmunds make a beautiful sound, elegant and transparent, with a real sense that these four players are friends both on and off the concert platform,” wrote Gramophone magazine. Hailed as one of the most exciting young string quartets, the Goldmund Quartett has received numerous prizes at prestigious competitions such as the Wigmore, Melbourne and ARD Munich for its exquisitely refined playing. In recent years the quartet has performed in leading venues on four continents, including at the Philharmonie de Paris, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, and Vienna’s Konzerthaus. LMMC debut.

https://www.goldmundquartet.com/

Notes

A work entitled Divertimento in Mozart’s time indicated a light instrumental piece in several movements designed specifically to entertain or please. As such, K. 138 certainly fulfills its intentions. Mozart himself entitled this work “Divertimento” though, depending on how you look at it, the work could also be a symphony, a string quartet, or something else. Whatever we call it, the music is thoroughly delightful in the happiest vein of a sixteen-year-old genius.  

If Dvořák’s most famous symphony is From the New World, his most famous string quartet is the American. Both works date from 1893. The symphony was composed in New York, where Dvořák was serving as director of the recently-opened National Conservatory, while the quartet was written in the tiny town of Spillville, Iowa, where he spent his summer vacation amongst a community of Czech immigrants. Understandably, many listeners suppose the themes Dvořák incorporated into his American Quartet were derived from American sources, but they are equally, if not more, related to the melodic patterns of Czech and Slovak folk music Dvořák heard all around him in Spillville.

Beethoven wrote his three Opus 59 quartets in 1806 on commission from Count Andrei Kirillovich Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador to Vienna from 1790 to 1814. Razumovsky was also a patron of the arts, music lover, and an amateur violinist. If the six Opus 18 quartets showed Beethoven paying tribute to the musical world he had inherited from Haydn and Mozart, the Opus 59 quartets reveal him as a totally individualistic, fully mature artist. This was “modern music” in its time, and it had plenty of detractors, just as modern music does today. However, one perceptive correspondent opined that these quartets “are of profound intellectual content, admirably developed, but not easy of access, although the third in C major should win the heart of every music lover by its originality and its melodic and harmonic power”.

Robert Markow