Fine Arts Quartet - Four American Quartets (2008)
Philip Glass - Bernard Herrmann - George Antheil - Ralph Evans
EAC | FLAC | Image (Cue&Log) ~ 289 Mb | Mp3 (CBR320) ~ 154 Mb | Scans included
Classical, Chamber | Label: Naxos | # 8.559354 | Time: 01:02:25
Philip Glass - Bernard Herrmann - George Antheil - Ralph Evans
EAC | FLAC | Image (Cue&Log) ~ 289 Mb | Mp3 (CBR320) ~ 154 Mb | Scans included
Classical, Chamber | Label: Naxos | # 8.559354 | Time: 01:02:25
This recording gathers four string quartets by American composers who are widely divergent in style and manner, and who have made a distinctive and personal contribution to this endlessly re-inventive format. Ralph Evans is more familiar as a performer than composer. Finally completed in 1995, his First String Quartet is written in a non-derivative style, with tuneful melodies, lively counterpoint and piquant harmonies. Philip Glass has completed five mature quartets, his Second Quartet deriving from a theatrical presentation of Samuel Beckett’s prose poem Company. The self-styled ‘bad boy of American music’, George Antheil wrote three string quartets, the third of which is permeated by a folk-music ambience. Best remembered for his film scores, Bernard Herrmann had not released a concert work for 25 years when he wrote Echoes. Its title applies to the thematic connections unobtrusively linking the ten sections of this one-movement piece.
