Calidore String Quartet - Resilience (2018) [Hi-Res]

In a world of dissonance and conflict combined with omnipresent media reporting, the unrelenting noise of social and political discord seems to be ever increasing. But the power of creativity inherent in music can provide balm and respite. This is the strong belief of the young players of the celebrated Calidore String Quartet and is their motivation for selecting this compelling repertoire for Resilience, their debut CD on Signum Records to be released worldwide on October 12.

The Calidore String Quartet is a recent Avery Fisher Career Grant and Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award recipient, and Grand-Prize winner of the 2016 M-Prize International Chamber Music Competition. The multi-award-winning ensemble is based in New York and already recognized as one of America’s foremost quartets with a steadily growing reputation in Europe and the UK where it is currently part of the BBC New Generation Artists scheme and a recent winner of a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship. The players wanted to find their own musical standpoint in the current environment of unrest and division, so they identified four masterworks from great composers who, whether in the midst of personal emotional turmoil or external conflict, seemed to find a cathartic path towards optimism through music.

In Mendelssohn’s String Quartet op. 80, composed in the wake of his beloved sister’s untimely death in 1847, the turbulence of grief and anger gives way to a sense of nostalgia and tenderness in the third movement to bring some sense of consolation. Janáček poured out his tumultuous feelings of unrequited love in his first string quartet based on Tolstoy’s novella ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’, a narrative that reflected his own frustration at being trapped in a loveless marriage while hopelessly in love with a younger woman.

Argentine composer Golijov was inspired by two contrasting experiences - one of violence in the Middle East and another of tranquillity in a planetarium - for his quartet Tenebrae, a study of conflict between the big-picture serenity of earth viewed from space and the close-up reality of pain and discord that troubles so much of the world. Decades before during the German army’s destruction of his Soviet homeland in 1941, Prokofiev was evacuated to the Kabardino-Balkar Republic, where he found a degree of emotional respite by immersing himself in the Kabardino folk rhythms and melodies to create a new palette of textures and sounds for his second String Quartet.