'round Midnight

"With sound of unsparing immediacy and Merlin's typically provocative notes, this release testifies to the Ébène's ambition and, moreover, its attainment." Gramophone Award WINNER 2022 - Chamber

'Round Midnight offers a creatively conceived program that brings together major figures from different streams of 20th-century music: Arnold Schönberg, Henri Dutilleux, and four masters of jazz and popular idioms - Thelonius Monk, Cole Porter, Henry Mancini, and Victor Young.

The three works are united by one common theme: the night. They are Schönberg's passionate late-Romantic sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), composed in 1899, for which the quartet is joined by viola-player Antoine Tamestit and cellist Nicolas Altstaedt; Dutilleux's glistening quartet Ainsi la nuit, first heard in 1978 and comprising seven brief movements, and Night bridge, a "nocturnal poem for string sextet" composed by the Ébène's cellist Raphaël Merlin. It muses on Monk's jazz standard 'Round Midnight, dating from around 1940; on Mancini's "Moon River", made famous by the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany's; on Porter's urbane and haunting "Night and Day", originally a hit in 1932; and on "Stella by Starlight", originally composed by Victor Young for the 1944 film The Uninvited.