Biography

Omer Bouchez  -  violin             
Elise Liu  -  violin 
Yung-Hsin Lou Chang  -  viola          
Anthony Kondo  -  cello

Maturity, sincerity, finesse and intelligence are the words that come to mind when hearing the Quatuor Hermès. It has been awarded first prizes at the Lyon International Competition (2009), the Geneva Competition (2011) and the Young Concert Artists Auditions in New York (2012). The French foursome joined forces as students at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique de Lyon in 2008. In 2012 their first disc appeared - music of Haydn and Beethoven. Subsequently they recorded the three quartets of Schumann, which have been highly praised in The Strad, France musique and CHOC. Among the prestigious venues where they have performed are the Lockenhaus Festival, the Orangerie de Sceaux, Festival Radio France Montpellier and the Crescendo Festival in Berlin. The quartet members were Artists in Residence at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel from 2012 to 2016. LMMC return engagement.

Notes

Beethoven’s six Opus 18 quartets are Janus-faced works revealing their stylistic debt to the Viennese tradition of Haydn and Mozart, but also indicating new directions in which Beethoven was headed. Each is ‘the creation of a young genius in the first full flower of his artistic and technical maturity’ writes Philip Hart, ‘although they do not achieve the vast scale or intense feeling that was to mark so much of Beethoven's later music, they do display a complete technical mastery of the idiom and an extraordinary variety and depth of expression’.

In between two repertory staples we hear a rarity in the genre, the first of Reynaldo Hahn’s two string quartets. Hahn was born in Caracas, but was for all intents and purposes a French composer, as his parents brought him to Paris at the age of three. Most of his music was written for the stage (operas, ballets, incidental music for plays), but he also left an impressive legacy of songs, the repertory for which he is best remembered today. The first quartet dates from 1939, and the fact that it bears a key signature (A minor) indicates that, in style, it is a throwback to an earlier age
and traditional forms.

Only two other composers of the nineteenth century matched Beethoven in both quantity and quality of their chamber music output. Dvořák was one, the other was Brahms. Dvořák wrote what was to become his most famous string quartet, nicknamed ‘American’, in the same country and in the same year (1893) as he wrote his most famous symphony, ‘From the New World’. Like so much of this composer’s music, it fairly bursts with melodic invention and rhythmic enthusiasm.

Robert Markow