Antonin Dvorak, Apple, Muse, Kutu…

• Antonin Dvorak
  String Quartet in F major op. 96 B.179 “American”. Eight waltzes op. 54, B.101. Quartet movement in F major, B.120. Talich Quartet.

Mythical Czech ensemble, the Talich Quartet had included in its catalog, as soon as it was released in 1976, the famous Quartet No. 12 “American” by Dvorak (1841-1904). If the musicians of this new version have changed in forty-six years, the spirit remains, which stands out from the high desire for abstraction carried by the Hagens, but also from the popular folklorism that their Czech colleagues willingly deploy (the Prazak Quartets , Pavel Haas or Panocha). It is indeed a natural and intimate vision, of great equanimity, that the Talich defend – round bows, homogeneous phrasing, luminous sonority. But the music is teeming with details and inventions, from a quicksilver “Allegro ma non troppo” to the final, choreographic and playful “Vivace”, passing through the expressive refinement of the “Lento” and an ideally “Molto vivace”. playful. Same qualities of freshness, refinement and elegance in the eight waltzes originally written for piano four hands (two were transcribed by Dvorak, the other six by the violinist Jiri Kabat), without forgetting the quartet movement which blossoms in a poetic and sensual osmosis. Marie Aude Roux

1 CD The Dolce Volta/ Harmonia Mundi.

• Gyorgy Kurtag
  Kafka-Fragments
  Anna Prohaska (soprano) and Isabelle Faust (violin).

Composed in 1985-1986 and dedicated to the psychologist Marianne Stein who had helped the composer some twenty-five years earlier to emerge from the existential abyss in which he was hiding. like a cockroach “, them Kafka-Fragments constitute the ultimate expressionist tendency of György Kurtag. The Hungarian musician born in 1926 declines in a dizzying way his art of miniature from a few phrases borrowed from various texts by Franz Kafka (Log, Wedding preparations in the countryside, correspondence). Limited for the most part to a few tens of seconds, these forty fragments are incredibly rich, from both a local and global point of view and, above all, they never seem unfinished. The principle of the walk, spiritual or anecdotal, constitutes its unity and duplication (Kafka/Kurtag, voice/violin), the symbolic perspective. In the chiselled interpretation of Anna Prohaska and Isabelle Faust, these fragments are to be heard like splinters, in every sense of the term. Pierre Gervasoni

1 CD Harmonia Mundi.

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