I have been listening to an old favorite: The Quartuor Mosaiques performing the music of Joseph Haydn.
Haydn composed a whole lot of string quartets. Man y of them were pacesetters for a whole lot of music that followed. This included compositions by Mozart and Beethoven.
There is a tremendous amount of creativity and originality built into Haydn’s quartets. And no other group performs these with as much caring, tenderness, warmth, and beauty than the Quartuor Mosaiques.
Many of these performances are not new. Yet I keep returning to them because of their inspirational nature.
In this CD, we get to hear the quartets from Opus 76.
This amazing group was founded by three Austrian musicians and a French cellist, Christophe Coin, who got to know each other in Vienna as members of Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s Concentus Musicus. With their shared experiences as a starting point, they decided to form a classical string quartet playing on period instruments. The primary aim was not to create the sort of ‘authenticity’ that belongs in museums, but rather to ensure in their work a living link to the great European quartet tradition.
Here is the quartet Op. 33, number 5 by Haydn:
