4 Quartets By Tchaikovsky, Haydn, Verdi & Malipiero - Leontovich String Quartet, Quartetto di Venezia

4 QUARTETS liner notes by rgbarbero9

After his first trip to England, Joseph Haydn busily prepared for another visit and composed six string quartets, which were published as opp. 71 & 74 in sets of three each. H. Robbins Landon, in his exhaustive study of Haydn’s works, wrote that they were “composed deliberately for the concert hall...Haydn paints with a broad brush. The immensely sophisticated, slow paced, almost epicurean unfolding of the 1790 work (op. 64, no. 1) is constrasted with the the high-powered, nervous brilliance of the 1793 pieces...Everything about the ”Salomon-Apponyi' quartets is more intense” ...It is my best work: not one of them has come to me so easily and fluently as this. I completed it as it were at one sitting." Thus wrote Peter I. Tchaikovsky about his Second Ouartet...The Italian Gian Francesco Malipiero had a predeliction for unadorned line, a need for brevity, and a horror of development that is apparent in a work virtually made up of themes alone. His was a style of succinct dramatic elocution that may be compared reasonably to speech compounded almost entirely of verbs, as the only words capable of expressing action...Giuseppe Verdi’s String Quartet is something of an anomaly in the catalog-and that’s putting it mildly. It is Verdi’s only piece of chamber music; indeed, it is the only important instrumental work from the composer’s maturity. Why did Verdi - a man who expended almost all of his creative energy on operas (and an unusually operatic Requiem Mass) - suddenly set to writing a string quartet in March 1873? The answer is simple and not very romantic: he wrote the quartet to kill time. Verdi was in Naples to supervise the local premiere of Aida; when the rehearsals were held up (due to the illness of soprano Teresa Stolz) he used the delay to fashion the four movements of the quartet.