After the success of their previous releases, the internationally acclaimed Cuarteto Quiroga returns with this double CD album joining forces with the world renowned violist Veronika Hagen to depict musically one of the most fascinating periods in music history: the birth and triumph of string quartet as genre and, with it, the advent of a new era, in which a new generation of Europeans saw in this pure, instrumental music an art that emanated from reason and thought but spoke directly to the feelings, and so had the power to persuade and convince, perfectly combining the syntactic and structural force of language with the free semantic poetics of the imagination. Music to illuminate a new world, music to instruct and seduce. A universal, democratising music, wholly modern and enlightened. To illustrate this journey to the musical Aufklärung the carefully selected repertoire focuses on four masterpieces by Haydn and Mozart written all in C-major, the symbolic key of Light, the key chosen as well by Haydn himself to depict the moment of Creation in his most famous oratorio, with the luminous cry of “Und Es Ward Licht!”.
This recording explains and celebrates a musical process which, child of its time, ended up shaping a way of writing and making music that would guide generations of composers, performers and music lovers, and whose ethical and aesthetic reflections still gleam brightly today. The four works of this double CD are beacons of light that relate to and intersect with one another – as listening to them conveys with great eloquence – their beams of light triangulating a musical map that defines the new era of modernity. A journey from darkness to light, from ingenuity to genius, from the human to the sublime. A journey to the very roots of Europe’s musical and cultural identity.