Béla Bartok - Quartets n°2&5 - PARKER string (...)

The Parker string quartet is 1st Grand Prix du Concours international de Bordeaux 2005 Prix du Mécénat Musical Société Générale Winner, 2005 Concert Artists Guild International Competition

The talented Quartet Parker has chosen to make its recorded debut with the String Quartets no.2 and no.5 of Béla Bartók. The Second Quartet, premiered on 3 March 1918, appeared ten years after the First Quartet, and was the fruit of a long period of maturation marked by two large-scale scores, Bluebeard’s Castle and The Wooden Prince. The extremely lyrical character of the work reflects the influence of The Wooden Prince, and constitutes the last trace of Romanticism in Bartók’s music while at the same time prefiguring the expressionist dimension of his second ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin. The Fifth Quartet, commissioned by the American patron Elisabeth Sprague Coolidge (1935), corresponds to a more classical and more clearly tonal phase in the composer’s output, while not yielding to the neo-classical trend of the times. The work is fundamentally dramatic in character, indicative of the tensions then prevailing in Europe. Bartók produced in his Fifth Quartet a powerful, determined composition.

To find Parker’string Quartet concerts

In the press

Bartok - Parker String Quartet

"...But the Parker tap something quite different : Bartok’s sense of humour.... The Parker’s Bartok spins the illusion of spontaneous improvisation, which is not to say that their performances sound unprepared : they have absorbed the language; they have the confidence to play freely with the music and the instinct to bring it off." Rob Cowan - Gramophone - April 2008

"Their international experience is non the less already considerable and their performances mature - hardly a surprise, perhaps, from a group which would choose for its CD debut a programme such as this and which also has a ligeti disc on its way. Their performance of the Bartok 2nd quartet is a commanding one, with the ebb and flow of tension in the first movement firmly and persuasively directed.....The 5th quartet faires even better... The market for Bartok recordings is quite crowded and neither recording would quite displace previous recommendations (Takacs, Zehetmair. All the same, it merits attention: besides being fine listening in its own right it marks an important new arrival on the quartet scene and for that alone would be welcome" Carl Rosman - International Record review october 2007.

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