Charles Gounod - The Complete String Quartets

Charles GOUNOD (1818-1893)

Complete String Quartets

String Quartet 'Petit Quartet' in D major, CG 561

String Quartet in A major, CG 562

String Quartet in A minor, CG 564

String Quartet in F major, CG 563

String Quartet in G minor, CG 565

Quatuor Cambini-Paris

Julien Chauvin (Violin)

Karine Crocquenoy (Violin)

Pierre-Éric Nimylowycz (Viola)

Atsushi Sakaï (Cello)

The Quatuor Cambini-Paris has made the world premiere recording of the complete quartets of Charles Gounod, two of which have never been released on disc before. The five quartets were recorded in the Golden Gallery of the Banque de France for the Aparté label, and will subsequently be toured in a series of concerts.

This project is in partnership with the Palazzetto Bru Zane, which will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the composer’s birth in 2018.

The quartet genre, brought to a peak of stylistic perfection by Haydn and Mozart became, with Beethoven, a locus for experimentation, in which no instrument took precedence over the others. This idea did not immediately catch on in France: Rode and Kreutzer developed the “quatuor brillant”, in which the first violin played the main melody, accompanied by its three subordinates. However, as a result of Beethoven’s influence, the egalitarian style gradually became the norm, as did the notion of the quartet as the ultimate serious genre, the main repository for a composer’s personal confidences. In the early 20th century, the string quartet came to represent the culmination of a career for many French composers. Since the widespread circulation of Beethoven’s last quartets had “condemned them to the status of masterpieces” (Joël-Marie Fauquet), composers tended to tackle this genre with a certain degree of trepidation. Like César Franck, who completed his first quartet in 1890, the year of his death, and Ernest Chausson, who did not finish the only quartet he began in 1898 (he died in 1899), Gabriel Fauré only turned to the genre for his very last work, the E Minor Quartet, opus 121 (1924).