'round Midnight

 
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HENRI DUTILLEUX / ARNOLD SCHOENBERG / RAPHAEL MERLIN
'round Midnight
Quatuor Ébène, with Antoine Tamestit (viola) and Nicolas Altstaedt (cello)

[ Erato Classics / CD ]

Release Date: Friday 15 October 2021

This item is only available to us via Special Order. We should be able to get it to you in 3 - 6 weeks from when you order it.

"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.

"[The Dutilleux] is played here with breathtaking brilliance...the performance of Verklärte Nacht is worth waiting for, its extraordinary attention to detail and clarity never achieved at the expense of tenderness and warmth." Five Stars BBC Music

"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

"[Verklärte Nacht is] played with febrile and dramatic intensity and lithe, restless precision. If you don't know this early Schoenberg, try this recording. If you already boast a shelf full of versions, you still need this one too." The Guardian

Tracks:

Dutilleux: String Quartet 'Ainsi la nuit'
Merlin, R: Night Bridge
Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4

Quatuor Ébène, Antoine Tamestit, Nicolas Altstaedt - Schönberg: Verklärte Nächt: I. Sehr langsam