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20 RAVEL / DUTILLEUX / DEBUSSY
The Debussy Quartet, the earliest in chronological order, here concludes
a recording whose order reflects your successive conquest of these three
French masterpieces. What were the circumstances in which you first
tackled the work?
We got to know this quartet at a special moment in our professional trajectory.
We had just arrived in Germany to study and we discovered a new approach to the
text, a different method of sound production. ‘Where does musical intuition come
from?’, people asked us in Berlin. We asked ourselves the same question, and our
interpretation of this work, which at first seemed obvious to us, has never ceased
to develop since then. It offers so many different possibilities – we had to force
ourselves to fix just one here . . .
The Debussy Quartet shows a maturity, an emotional power, a carnal dimension
too, that we find especially touching. As of today – and this is probably no
coincidence – it’s the work we have played most often in concert.