Paris-based Quatuor Ebène has released three classics of the French repertoire, the quartets of Debussy, Ravel, and Fauré. Although the works are frequently grouped together on recordings, they inhabit vastly different aesthetic worlds and are more notable for their individuality than their similarity. The last written, the Fauré (1924), is the most conservative, and the first, the Debussy (1893), the most revolutionary. The quartet performs the Debussy with a refreshing muscularity, the kind of dynamism the composer wrote ...
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Paris-based Quatuor Ebène has released three classics of the French repertoire, the quartets of Debussy, Ravel, and Fauré. Although the works are frequently grouped together on recordings, they inhabit vastly different aesthetic worlds and are more notable for their individuality than their similarity. The last written, the Fauré (1924), is the most conservative, and the first, the Debussy (1893), the most revolutionary. The quartet performs the Debussy with a refreshing muscularity, the kind of dynamism the composer wrote into the score, but that some quartets tend to downplay, perhaps in an effort to make it comfortably conform to the popular image of the composer as an Impressionist. In fact, it has moments of real spikiness and angularity, particularly in the first two movements, that Quatuor Ebène plays with appropriate fierceness. At the same time, the reading is exceptionally fluid rhythmically, and its mercurial shifts emphasize the magic (and the strangeness) of a piece that offers an early...
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Add this copy of Debussy, Fauré & Ravel: String Quartets to cart. $25.90, new condition, Sold by newtownvideo rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from huntingdon valley, PA, UNITED STATES, published 2008 by Warner Classics/Parlophone.