Quatuor Arod record Mendelssohn String Quartet Op.13 in A Minor - Adagio (Part 1 of 2)

Album out September 2017: Jordan Victoria (violin I), Alexandre Vu (violin II), Corentin Apparailly (viola), Samy Rachid (cello). On this debut album of Mendelssohn, the Arod Quartet performs with a singer, the young mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa, who is already making her mark as an Erato artist. The string players accompany her in the song ‘Ist es wahr?, which supplied thematic material for the composer’s String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, op 13. The album is completed by the Quartet No. 4 in E minor, op 44 No. 2 and the Four Pieces for String Quartet op 81. As the members of the quartet explain, Mendelssohn has played an important place in their musical life together. “Four years ago the four of us met. We opened our first score in a small, badly-lit room at the Paris Conservatoire, and we started to play.” The music was Mendelssohn’s op 13. “We were overwhelmed with love for the quartet as a form; it had us in its grip and it has never let us go. Time has passed, but op 13 has remained close to our hearts … We have grown up with it, learned with it and won our two biggest competitions with it … Felix Mendelssohn has been so important in our life as a quartet that we have decided to delve into his, conceiving this album as a narrative of his life as a composer, as seen through his works for quartet: the first quartet he composed (op 13); the quartet he wrote in the year he got married, 10 years later (op 44 No. 2), and the four pieces of op 81, written at different periods, but in particular during the last three years of his life.”