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QUATUOR HERMÈS 17
Why did you choose this French programme two years after a first
recording devoted to Schumann’s three Quartets op.41?
Quatuor Hermès:
At the time whenwe recorded the Schumann, we only had the
Third Quartet in our repertoire, but we were very keen to assimilate the opus as a
whole. Our complete recording gave us the opportunity to defend a very personal
interpretation while still remaining faithful to the composer and his imaginative
world. It was also a chance to pass on a shared and spontaneous emotion, a
youthful momentum!
The idea of the Ravel-Dutilleux-Debussy programme was already there in the
background when we decided on the content of our first disc, but at that stage we
wanted to concentrate on a single composer and not to be immediately associated
with these keyworks of the French repertoire.What’smore, theRavel andDutilleux
quartets in particular had been part of our existence for so long that we felt rather
apprehensive about ‘fixing’ an interpretation in a first recording.