Biography

Alexander Pavlovsky  -  violin             
Sergei Bresler  -  violin 
Ori Kam  -  viola          
Kyril Zlotnikov  -  cello

“Passion, precision, warmth, a gold blend” – these are the terms in which the New York Times described the Jerusalem Quartet. With its founding in the 1993-1994 season and subsequent 1996 debut, these Israeli musicians embarked on a journey of growth and maturation that has resulted in a wide repertory and great depth of expression: a journey still motivated by the energy and curiosity with which the ensemble began more than a quarter century ago and has by now been experienced on five continents. The Quartet records exclusively for Harmonia Mundi – over a dozen releases to date – and its discs have been awarded numerous prizes. The Haydn quartets CD won the chamber category of the 2010 BBC Music magazine awards and the Diapason d’Or Arte, while their release of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden Quartet received an ECHO Klassik Award in 2009 and was featured as Editor’s Choice in the July 2008 edition of Gramophone Magazine. In 2003 the Quartet was the recipient of the first Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award. It was also part of the first-ever BBC New Generation Artists scheme from 1999 to 2001. The ensemble’s recording of the Schumann Piano Quartet with Alexander Melnikov was nominated for the 2013 International Classical Music Awards. Recently the Quartet released a unique recording (The Yiddish Cabaret) of Jewish music in Central Europe between the wars and its far-reaching influence. 3rd LMMC appearance.

http://www.jerusalem-quartet.com/

Notes

The Mendelssohn quartet that opens this program is the work of a young man who has not even reached his maturity. Technically it was not his first quartet, but it was the first published, so it has become known as “No. 1.” It is an astonishingly mature work for a twenty-year-old. A composer twice or three times Mendelssohn’s age would have been proud to offer it as his own. Of special note are the outpouring of melody in the first movement (no fewer than four themes), the fairyland charm of the second, the romantic reverie of the third (led by the first violin), and the mood of high drama in the fourth (but be prepared for a surprise ending!)

Paul Ben-Haim is regarded as an Israeli composer, but he was born in Germany (Munich) as Paul Frankenburger. During the 1920s he served first as assistant conductor to Bruno Walter and Hans Knappertsbusch, later as conductor of the Augsburg Opera. In 1933 he emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine, became an Israeli citizen upon Israel’s independence in 1948, and Hebraized his name to Ben-Haim. Middle-Eastern and folk elements are found in his First String Quartet of 1937. This was Ben-Haim’s first major work after immigrating to Palestine, and consequently one of the first major works composed in what was to become the State of Israel. Musicologist Yoel Greenberg notes that “stylistically, the quartet owes more to the French tradition of Debussy and Ravel than to the German influences of Reger and Strauss.”

Debussy’s String Quartet is one of the glories of the French chamber music repertory. Debussy was still testing his wings as a composer when he wrote it at the age of about thirty. Freedom of form, a predilection for the whole-tone scale, and myriad textural and sonorous effects (all those shimmering arpeggios, extended passages of pizzicato on all four instruments, and veiled muted passages, to name but a few) were incorporated into the quartet. Curiously, it is one of Debussy’s very few compositions to bear a tonality as part of its title, and justly so, for it does indeed remain firmly planted in the key of G minor for three of its four movements.

Robert Markow