César Franck - Piano Quintet; String Quartet (Artur Pizarro; Petersen Quartet)

Information

Composer: César Franck

• Piano Quintet in F minor, M. 7
• String Quartet in D major, M. 9

Artur Pizarro, piano

Petersen Quartet

    Conrad Muck, violin

    Daniel Bell, violin

    Friedemann Weigl, viola

    Henry David Varema, cello

Date: 2008

Label: Phoenix

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Description

Both works on this new Phoenix Edition recording are from César Franck’s late period of composition. The Piano Quintet in F minor, owes its formal arrangement to Beethoven’s Quartetto serioso in F minor op. 95 and with its expressive, dramatic and symphonic structure heralded a new dimension of French chamber music. The massively symphonic and majestic sound with the highly virtuoso piano part pushes the work to the frontier between chamber and orchestral music.

The String Quartet completed in 1890 bears witness to his increased preoccupation with Beethoven’s late works. Vincent d’Indy described it as a “sonate cyclique”, the composer’s own accented restoration of sonata form, a balancing act between simplicity and complexity of the formal structure.

The Petersen Quartet, praised for many years for its courageously expressive tonal aesthetics and interpretations, is supported in this recording by an equally virtuosic Artur Pizarro, who knows how to elicit everything “monumentally symphonic” from the demanding piano part.

Artur Pizarro is a critically acclaimed pianist who has a broad range of repertoire across a variety of well known labels including Hyperion, Naxos, Harmonia Mundi and Collins Classics. He now extends his repertoire to the piano music of Faure and appears for the first time on Phoenix Edition.

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César Franck (10 December 1822 – 8 November 1890) was a composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher who worked in Paris during his adult life. As an organist he was particularly noted for his skill in improvisation. Franck is considered by many the greatest composer of organ music after Bach. Franck exerted a significant influence on music. He helped to renew and reinvigorate chamber music and developed the use of cyclic form. He became professor at the Paris Conservatoire in 1872, his pupils included Vincent d'Indy, Ernest Chausson, Louis Vierne, Charles Tournemire, Guillaume Lekeu and Henri Duparc.

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Artur Pizarro (born 1968 in Lisbon) is an internationally-acclaimed Portuguese concert pianist. He studied with Sequeira Costa in Lisbon and at the University of Kansas. His other teachers include Aldo Ciccolini, Géry Moutier and Bruno Rigutto at the Conservatoire de Paris. Pizarro won first prize in several international piano competitions, and has performed internationally in solo recitals, in duos, with chamber music groups, and as a soloist with the world's leading orchestras. He has an extensive discography available on Linn Records, as well as on Naxos, Hyperion, Collins Classics, and other labels.

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The Petersen Quartet was founded in 1979 at the Hanns Eisler School of Music in former East Berlin. Named after founder Ulrike Petersen, the ensemble developed an extensive repertoire spanning from classical to contemporary works. It achieved international acclaim through award-winning recordings, particularly of Beethoven's late string quartets, earning honors such as the Grand Prix of the Académie Charles Cros and Gramophone Editor's Choice. The quartet has collaborated with leading musicians worldwide and is currently completing a full Beethoven string quartet recording cycle for the Capriccio label.

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