The Ysaÿe Quartet
The Ysaÿe Quartet was formed in 1984 while the members were still students at the Paris Conservatory. The Quartet is named after the violinist, quartet-player and composer Eugene Ysaÿe (1858-1931) who was a powerful influence on the musical world of his day.
Since its formation, the Ysaÿe Quartet has had the opportunity to work with Walter Levin of the LaSalle Quartet and with members of the Amadeus Quartet in Cologne. In 1988, the Quartet gained international recognition by being the first French quartet to win the Grand Prize at the Evian International Competition.
Since then, the Quartet has been invited to play throughout the world. They have toured Japan and performed at Suntory Hall in Tokyo; around the US and at Carnegie Hall; and throughout Europe including the Théâtre de la Ville and Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris, the Wigmore Hall and South Bank in London, the Brahms Saal in Vienna, the Philharmonie in Berlin, as well as in Geneva, Bremen, Leipzig, Florence, Madrid and at the Salzburg, Stresa and Lockenhaus Festivals. Last season, the Quartet undertook an extensive tour of Australia and New Zealand.
The Ysaÿe Quartet’s discography includes recordings of works by Mozart, Mendelssohn, Debussy, Ravel and Fauré. Their most recent releases, on their own record label, feature Haydn’s String Quartets, Op 54 and Schumann’s String Quartets, Op 41.
Since 1994, the Ysaÿe Quartet has developed a keen interest in teaching and have founded a class especially for string quartets at the Conservatoire Superieur de Musique de Paris. In 2002, the Quartet undertook a teaching residency at the Britten-Pears School in Aldeburgh.
The Quartet also has a deep interest in the contemporary music and their performances have been a catalyst for new works by Boucourechliev, Dusapin, Krawczyk, Monnet, Tanguy and Escaich. In 2006, they will give the world premiere of a Clarinet Quintet by Friedrich Cehar in Vienna.
Guillaume Sutre
Violin
Guillaume Sutre joined the Ysaÿe Quartet in 1995 at the age of 25, having already distinguished himself in the European music world. A graduate of the Paris Conservatory, he won its First Prize in violin in 1987, followed by a First Prize at the Curci International Violin Competition in Naples, and, as a founding member of the Trio Wanderer, First Prize at the Fischoff and Munich Competitions. He has appeared as a soloist with Menuhin and Dutoit in Paris and Berlin; and in recitals at the Wigmore Hall in London, the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, and in Salzburg and Geneva. As a soloist and chamber musician, Sutre has toured South America, Africa and Southeast Asia.
Luc-Marie Aguera
Violin
Luc-Marie Aguera studied at the Conservatories of Rouen and Paris, where he won First Prize in both violin and chamber music. A founding member of the Ysaÿe Quartet, he has given it his full professional attention.
Miguel da Silva
Viola
Miguel da Silva began his musical studies in Reims, and subsequently attended the Paris Conservatory, winning First Prizes in viola and chamber music, as well as the 1987 Paris International Grand Prize for Chamber Music. A member of the Paris Opera Orchestra from 1983 to 1987, he has since devoted himself entirely to the Quartet.
Yovan Markovitch
Cello
Yovan Markovitch studied cello at the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique et de Danse in Paris with Maurice Gendron and Michel Strauss. In 1990 he was awarded the top prize in the cello class, as well as two awards for chamber music. Following these studies, Markovitch enrolled at Yale University, where he worked under Aldo Parisot.
A founding member of the Castagnieri Quartet (now disbanded), Markovitch has performed in major concert halls including the Wigmore Hall in London, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and the Châtelet in Paris. He was a member of the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris, before joining the Ysaÿe Quartet. Yovan Markovitch gained his teaching diploma in 1995, and has taught regularly since then.
Yovan Markovitch plays a cello made by Pietro Guarneri in 1739.
The accommodation for the Ysaÿe Quartet is sponsored by
Hyacinthe Jadin
String Quartet in E flat major, Op 2, No 1
Largo - Allegro moderato
Adagio
Menuetto
Finale Allegro
Gabriel Fauré
Claude Debussy
String Quartet in E minor, Op 121
Allegro moderato
Andante
Allegro
– 15 minute interval –
String Quartet in G minor, Op 10
Animé et très décidé
Assez vif et bien rythmé
Andantino (Doucement expressif) –
Un peu plus vite – 1er mouvement
Très modéré – En animant peu à peu –
Très mouvementé et avec passion – A tempo –
Très animé – Très vif
(1776-1800)
1795 1798
E 121 (1845-1924)
1876
1895
1923 1924
String Quartet in E flat major, Op 2, No 1
Hyacinthe Jadin
(1776-1800)
This is without doubt the most original of the 12 string quartets, divided into four opuses, composed and published by Hyacinthe Jadin between 1795 and 1798. It is probable that, before composing this quartet dedicated to his friend Devic, he had heard Mozart’s Dissonant Quartet (K 465) or at least had read the score (through seeing a manuscript or edition of the separate parts, since at this time chamber music was not published in the form of a score combining the various parts). There is a strong resemblance between the two works which seems to testify to the influence of Mozart on the young composer from Versailles, as regards both the structure in four movements, very rare in France, and the composition. Proof of this may be found in the slow introduction to the first movement which, 10 years after the Dissonant Quartet, is characterised by its tonal ambiguity. This leads into a luminous Allegro which, after a few hesitations, establishes the principal tonality.
Remarkably mature, Jadin’s quartet composition achieves an instrumental balance and a fullness of sound which is astonishing in its modernity. The Adagio (second movement), in sonata form, opens with a moving cello solo in a somewhat highpitched register. The assertive rhythmics of the Menuetto, which play on shifting stresses, are set against the more sustained legato of the Trio. The Finale Allegro, whose sonata form is clearly apparent, provides a contrast to the third movement in its energy and its demand for virtuosity.
Michelle Garnier-Panafieu
Notes provided by the Quartet
Translated by Natasha Rogai
String Quartet in E minor, Op 121
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)
Fauré is remembered today as a composer of exquisite songs and piano pieces, evocative orchestral miniatures, and of a simple and beautiful Requiem Mass. A friend described the young Fauré as a self-consciously romantic figure, “very seductive, very tanned of face, [with] a very dreamy melancholy air”. Yet, early in his compositional career, he steeled himself to produce some important works for chamber ensemble, including the First Violin Sonata (1876), and two formidable Piano Quartets, which are among his earliest surviving important works. His chamber music reached its mature zenith in the great Piano Quintet completed in 1895, but thereafter he contributed nothing more to the genre for twenty years.
It was not until the last years of the First World War, when he himself was already in his early seventies that Fauré returned to chamber music, producing a second violin sonata, two cello sonatas, and another quintet in a concentrated late flowering. All these were works with piano, however.
Extraordinarily, it was not until his publisher Durand actually asked him to, that Fauré turned to compose his first and only quartet for strings alone in 1923-24. Hitherto, Fauré had been diffident about embarking on such a work, especially knowing that it would inevitably be compared with Debussy’s ‘modernist’ quartet.
In his quartet, however, Fauré looked back to his own youth and took as his starting point for the rhapsodic first movement the opening movement of his unfinished 1880 violin concerto. The second movement is an extended reverie, in which the first violin leads in an ever developing song.
Fauré was fatally ill by the time he completed the finale. He described it, nevertheless, as “light and pleasant”, perhaps playing down its more seriously powerful contrapuntal structure. This final movement ends, as did Fauré’s own life, shortly afterward, with disarming vitality. – 15 minute interval –
String Quartet in G minor, Op 10
Claude Debussy
(1862-1918)
Debussy composed this Quartet for the Société Nationale de Musique, an organisation committed to the work of young French composers. It was premiered for the Société in December 1893 by an ensemble led by the Belgian-born violinist Eugène Ysaÿe. Debussy began the Quartet late in 1892, while already at work on the Prélude à l’après midi d’un faune
The orchestral Prélude, his ‘impression’ of Mallarmé’s poem, remains one of Debussy’s most characteristic creations. Meanwhile the Quartet quickly became uncharacteristic of his hopes and intentions. Even at the time he did not find the change of gear to classical chamber-music idioms easy, noting in a letter to Chausson that: “I have not achieved what I set out to achieve, and have had to start all over again three times”. The result is a compromise between the academically-approved motivic style, and Debussy’s ongoing experiments with more continuous, freely developing, descriptive forms.
A contemporary critic referred to the Quartet as “a very interesting work in which the predominant influence is of young Russia”, and remarked on “sustained harmonies that evoke a memory of the gamelan”. Most of the Quartet (except the third movement) concentrates on a single motto-theme from the very first bar. Otherwise, the focus of the first movement is on the endlessly changing surfaces of the linking passages, which in their shifting patterns resemble dappled light. In the second movement (which opens with pizzicato chords) the motto, chromatically altered, is first mixed up in a curious mechanistic-sounding texture, before becoming the basis of a high sustained violin tune over a susurrating accompaniment. The third movement is hypnotically serene, and reaches its core in a magical middle section. The finale opens with a brief slow passage reintroducing the motto, before it is transformed as a theme of a brusque fugato beginning with the cello.
Unless otherwise specified, all programme notes by Graeme Skinner
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