Chiaroscuro

After searching for their own roots in 'Landscapes' and engaging with their namesake Robert Schumann in 'Intermezzo', the four musicians complete their trilogy with the album 'Chiaroscuro', which in itself represents an equally exciting journey through time and temperament. By way of Mozart's arrangements of five selected fugues from Bach's 'Well-Tempered Clavier II' they look left and right into very different musical rooms. There are two early pieces for string quartet by Shostakovich, Philip Glass's 'Company String Quartet', a short fugue by Felix Mendelssohn, and the 'Six Bagatelles, Op. 9' by Anton Webern. The whole promenade culminates in Janácek's last work, his 'Second String Quartet'. Chiaroscuro - Italian for 'light and dark' - is the name of the programme. The Schumann Quartet combines works that could not be more different. It is a question of the 'unity that the album forms', perhaps not in spite of, but just because of the contrasts. And when at the very end of the album, at the very end of the whole trilogy, we hear Gershwin's 'Lullaby', we cannot shake off the feeling that all this is such stuff as dreams are made of.