Video of the day: Chiaroscuro Quartet Live from Wigmore Hall

Gramophone
Monday, July 29, 2019

A live-streamed concert featuring music by Beethoven and Schubert

London's Wigmore Hall is one of the world's great venues for the enjoyment of chamber music and their live streams on YouTube are well worth catching if you can't be there in person, not only for the music-making, but for the recording quality and production values of the filming.

Their most recent live stream features the Chiaroscuro Quartet playing Beethoven's String Quartet in C minor, Op 18 No 4 and Schubert's Death and the Maiden (skip to 7'00'' for the beginning of the stream):

The Chiaroscuro Quartet's recent recording of Death and the Maiden was an Editor's Choice in the November 2018 issue of Gramophone, with Richard Wigmore writing: 'As an engulfing, visceral experience, the Chiaroscuro’s Death and the Maiden ranks alongside two of my favourite versions, the Alban Berg’s later recording (EMI/ Warner, 3/86) and the Gramophone Award-winning Pavel Haas (Supraphon, 10/13). And its astringent ‘period’ sound world puts it in a category of its own. A chasm separates the Death and the Maiden from the 18-year-old Schubert’s G minor Quartet, offered here as a digestif. Parts of the first movement and minuet sound like gawky takes on Haydn and Mozart in Sturm und Drang vein. Yet in a performance as bracingly immediate as this, the work has plenty of enjoyably Schubertian touches, whether in the Andante’s airy dance or the paprikaflavoured finale, duly relished here.' 

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