String Quartet in D Major, Op.18, No. 3
String Quartet in E-Flat Major, Op. 74 'Harp'

A successful conclusion: Completion of theeight-part Beethoven edition with the Quartetto di Cremona

The Quartetto di Cremona has spent overthree years working on its recording series comprising all twenty stringquartets as well as the two string quintets by Ludwig van Beethoven - agigantic project which most ensembles tackle at a more advanced age. However,the Quartetto di Cremona, founded in 2000, wanted to experience it sooner -their leader, Cristiano Gualco, explains that "each Beethoven quartet is sodistinct and tells a different story. When one has played all the quartets, notonly does one really know Beethoven, but doing so also sharpens the mind forall music after him. For everyone has studied Beethoven."

The audite Beethoven cycle, with itsexciting blend of spirit, precision and sense of sound - the Quartetto diCremona's trademark - has its finger on the pulse: the success was so immediatethat, following the first volumes, concert halls across Europe and the USinvited the ensemble to perform: in many quarters their recordings enjoyreference status. Thanks to studying Beethoven so thoroughly, the ensemble'sbroad repertoire has gained a new level of intensity and their playing culturehas been honed even further, both in terms of detailed expression and ofoverarching gestures and contours.

The final volume of the edition opens withthe third of the Op. 18 Quartets with which Beethoven introduced himself as acomposer in 1800 - six quartets which indeed all tell their own "story". Fromthe tentative beginning, cautiously drawing the listener in,through to the tempestuous concluding tarantella, every bar of the Quartet in Dmajor is replete and carefully considered.

Beethoven's debut quartet is contrastedwith the so-called "Harp Quartet" Op. 74, featuring yet another formalsolution. A cunningly conceived first movement with prominent plucked "harpnotes" is answered by the finale, where Beethoven reuses a (discarded) numberfrom his incidental music to Goethe's freedom drama Egmont as a theme and variations - a clear indication of the factthat the composer, in 1809, at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, lived throughpolitically precarious times.