TARTINI STRING QUARTET: QUATTRO SONATE À QUATTRO

Classical and Modern Music

Format: CD

Code: 116001

EAN: 3838898116001

The Tartini String Quartet has recorded Quattro Sonate à Quattro composed by the celebrated violinist Giuseppe Tartini.

Tartini String Quartet

Miran Kolbl - First violin

Romeo Drucker - Second violin

Aleksandar Milošev - viola

Miloš Mlejnik - cello

The Tartini String Quartet ranks among the best chamber ensembles on the Slovenian chamber music scene. It was founded in 1983 when the leaders of the four string sections of the Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra decided to enrich their music experience in that most sublime of all chamber groups, the string quartet. They formed the Slovenian Philharmonic String Quartet, but subsequently, in the early 1990s, adopted the name of the famous Piran violinist Giuseppe Tartini.

In the course of many years of playing together, the Tartini String Quartet has become an ambassador of first-rate Slovenian musical culture on both domestic and international concert stages. The members of the quartet have collaborated with many Slovenian and international artists, including Irena Grafenauer, Mate Bekavac, Lovro Pogorelich, Maria Graf, Radovan Vlatković, Gary Karr, Franco Gulli, Enrica Cavallo, Bruno Giuranna, Rocco Filippini and many others.

The high artistic ranking of the quartet has been confirmed by performances on the concert stages of important European music centres, such as Barcelona, Bratislava, Berlin, Genova, Geneva, Munich, Salzburg, Turin, Venice, Vienna and elsewhere.

In addition to live performances, the Tartini String Quartet has made numerous recordings of Slovenian compositions for string quartet in one of the most modern European studios, Studio 13 of Radio Slovenia in Ljubljana. The quartet has long been active in this field, having made recordings for various radio, television and publishing houses, including RTV Slovenia, Stradivarius Milano, TV Suisse Romande, RAI Italia, ORF Austria, RTV Spain and HRT Croatia. Their CDs include works by Dvořák, Ravel, Mozart, Schubert, Chausson and others.

For its artistic achievements, the Tartini String Quartet has received the Prešeren Fund Prize, the highest Slovenian state award for achievements in culture.

Giuseppe Tartini

The celebrated violinist Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770) is a symbol of Piran; in fact, he is Piran’s cultural heritage. A native of Piran on his mother’s side, the young Giuseppe left his seaside birthplace and moved to Italy, where he enriched musical life in Padua, Assisi and Venice as a violin virtuoso, composer, pedagogue and theorist in the first half of the eighteenth century. Tartini continued the musical tradition of Antonio Vivaldi and Arcangelo Corelli, influencing the development of violin playing in terms of both bowing and finger technique. Although in the last two decades of his life he was mainly concerned with the philosophy of music, maestro Tartini wrote a large number of compositions for violin, which are preserved in many libraries and private archives.

In addition to about 130 violin concertos, 170 solo sonatas, sonatas with obbligato basso continuo and 40 trio sonatas, there are also four sonatas à quattro. In contrast to the trio sonata, the sonata à quattro is written for two violins, viola and cello. The sonata developed in Italy towards the end of the sixteenth century as a variant of the cantata, which was intended for singing. The name sonata comes from the Italian word sonare, which means ‘to sound’, and in the original sense denotes a composition for one or two solo instruments. In its classical form, the sonata consists of three or four independent movements, which contrast with each other in form, tempo and tonality. Sonatas are also named according to the ensemble for which they are written. Thus, for example, the Baroque sonata à tre is written for three solo instruments and the sonata à quattro for four instruments. Baroque sonatas were mainly intended for string instruments. The most popular musical form, which survived until the second half of the eighteenth century, was the trio sonata. It was intended for an ensemble of two string instruments and basso continuo played by a low instrument, usually the viola da gamba or cello, along with an organ or harpsichord. When Baroque composers added another voice to the trio sonata, the compositions were called sonatas à quattro. The development of this form was decisively influenced by the new monodic vocal style.

Tartini’s sonatas à quattro are in three movements. Since Giuseppe Tartini was not in the habit of dating his musical opus, musicologists assume that the compositions for four string instruments were composed in the decade between 1760 and 1770. A lively first movement and, for the end of the sixteenth century, a rather virtuosic finale provide the framework for a typically “Tartiniesque” cantabile slow movement. Due to their chamber character and the imaginative intertwining of the musical themes between the four strings, Tartini’s sonatas à quattro can be regarded as forerunners of the string quartet, which, after being developed by Luigi Boccherini and Carl von Dittersdorf, gained its final form in the hands the father of the string quartet, Joseph Haydn.

Roman Leskovic

Content

Sonata à Quattro/Sinfonia D – dur/Re maggiore/D Major, C.551/78

Allegro

Andantino

Allegro

Sonata à Quattro G – dur/Sol maggiore/G Major

Presto

Andante

Allegro assai

Sonata à Quattro D – dur/Re maggiore/D Major, B.897

Allegro assai

Larghetto

Allegro

Sonata à Quattro/Sinfona A – dur/La maggiore/A Major, C.538

Allegro assai

Andante assai

Menuett, allegro assai