Biography

Alexander Pavlovsky, Sergei Bresler  -  violins
Mathis Rochat  -  viola
Kyril Zlotnikov -  cello

2025 marks the thirtieth year of the Jerusalem Quartet. “Passion, precision, warmth, a gold blend” are the terms in which the New York Times described this ensemble. With its founding in the mid-1990s, these Israeli musicians embarked on a journey of growth and maturation that has resulted in a wide repertory and great depth of expression: a journey still motivated by the energy and curiosity with which the ensemble began more than a quarter century ago and has by now been experienced on five continents. Until 2025 the Quartet recorded exclusively for Harmonia Mundi – 13 releases in all – which have been awarded numerous prizes. The Haydn quartets CD won the chamber category of the 2010 BBC Music magazine awards and the Diapason d’Or Arte, while their release of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden Quartet received an ECHO Klassik Award in 2009 and was featured as Editor’s Choice in the July 2008 edition of Gramophone Magazine. A recent release of special import is The Yiddish Cabaret  ̶  Jewish music in Central Europe between the wars and its far-reaching influence. As of 2025, the Jerusalem Quartet is now with BIS; its initial release consists of three Shostakovich quartets (2,7,10). 4th LMMC concert.

https://www.jerusalem-quartet.com/

Notes

The Dissonant Quartet is the last of the six “Haydn” Quartets Mozart wrote between 1782 and 1785.The nickname is not Mozart’s, and it refers only to the 22 measures of the slow introduction. Here we find some of the most audacious harmonies and chromatic voice-leading of the entire eighteenth century. The dissonances Mozart incorporated create a mood of uncertainty, tension, and suspense. Release comes when the main Allegro section arrives in sunny, radiant C major. The Andante cantabile is one of Mozart’s most searching, intimate movements, spun out like the deeply reflective cantilena of an operatic heroine. The Menuetto is rather brusque, while the finale fairly bubbles over with high spirits and humor.

Israeli-American composer Shulamit Ran enjoys worldwide exposure. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her Symphony in 1990, and taught at the University of Chicago for many years, retiring in 2015. Betwixt and Between was co-commissioned by the Philharmonie de Paris and composed for the Jerusalem Quartet on the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary in 2025. The composer writes: “Upheaval, the first movement, is rather volatile, traversing a wide range of moods and expressive ‘types.’ The second movement, Sway, has the feel and the motion of a dance. In the score I marked it as ‘quasi Latin dance.’ For me it was also about the compositional challenge of continuously varying extremely limited melodic and harmonic cells that gradually expand in scope and grow in excitement yet ultimately disintegrate. Concluding the quartet is Supplication, the work’s slow movement, part dark musings, part chorale, culminating in an intense plea.”

Listeners in search of a transcendent musical experience can do no better than approach Beethoven’s Op. 130. Beethoven worked on this intensely personal, often introspective quartet throughout most of 1825. Contrast is the keynote, a quality obvious from the opening pages, where the first 25 bars of music contain four radical tempo changes, alternating between adagio and allegro. The second movement lasts just two minutes, moving elusively, almost wraithlike, through a series of frequent tempo and meter changes. Next comes what musicologist Michael Steinberg calls “perhaps the most sensuously beautiful movement” in all the Beethoven quartets. The fourth movement is genial and gentle, featuring a lilting, folk-like theme. The Cavatina is the poetic and spiritual heart of the quartet, composed, as a friend observed, “amid sorrow and tears; never did his music breathe so heartfelt an inspiration.” The final movement, in the quartet’s original form, was the Grosse Fuge we hear today‒an immense, fifteen-minute fugue of great complexity and difficulty. (Beethoven’s publisher prevailed upon him to replace it with something more modest, in which form it is usually performed now.) “If architecture is frozen music,” wrote one commentator, “then this piece is something of a Gothic cathedral in motion.”

Robert Markow